previous next

Since the Crotoniates in their anger would take no prisoners but slew all who fell into their hands in the flight, the larger number of the Sybarites perished; and they plundered the city of Sybaris and laid it entirely waste. [2] Fifty-eight years later1 Thessalians joined in settling the city, but after a little while they were driven out by the Crotoniates, in the period we are now discussing. [3] And shortly thereafter the city was moved to another site and received another name, its founders being Lampon and Xenocritus; the circumstances of its refounding were as follows.

The Sybarites who were driven a second time from their native city dispatched ambassadors to Greece, to the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, requesting that they assist their repatriation and take part in the settlement. [4] Now the Lacedaemonians paid no attention to them, but the Athenians promised to join in the enterprise, and they manned ten ships and sent them to the Sybarites under the leadership of Lampon and Xenocritus; they further sent word to the several cities of the Peloponnesus, offering a share in the colony to anyone who wished to take part in it. [5] Many accepted the offer and received an oracular response from Apollo that they should found a city in the place where there would be“ Water to drink in due measure, but bread to eat without measure.
”They put in at Italy and arriving at Sybaris they set about hunting the place which the god had ordered them to colonize. [6] Having found not far from Sybaris a spring called Thuria, which had a bronze pipe which the natives of the region called medimnos,2 and believing this to be the place which the god had pointed out, they threw a wall about it, and founding a city there they named it Thurium after the spring. [7] They divided the city lengthwise by four streets, the first of which they named Heracleia, the second Aphrodisia, the third Olympias, and the fourth Dionysias, and breadthwise they divided it by three streets, of which the first was named Heroa, the second Thuria, and the last Thurina. And since the quarters formed by these streets were filled with dwellings, the construction of the city appeared to be good.

1 In 453 B.C.

2 Medimnos among the Greeks was a measure of grain.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Sybaris (3)
Thuria (2)
Thurium (Italy) (1)
Peloponnesus (Greece) (1)
Italy (Italy) (1)
Greece (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
453 BC (1)
hide References (9 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: