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1

When Callias was archon in Athens, the Romans elected in place of consuls four military tribunes, Publius Cornelius . . . Gaius Fabius, and among the Eleians the Ninety-second Olympiad was celebrated, that in which Exaenetus of Acragas won the "stadion." In this year it came to pass that, after the Athenians had collapsed in Sicily, their supremacy was held in contempt; [2] for immediately the peoples of Chios, Samos, Byzantium, and many of the allies revolted to the Lacedaemonians. Consequently the Athenian people, being disheartened, of their own accord renounced the democracy, and choosing four hundred men they turned over to them the administration of the state. And the leaders of the oligarchy, after building a number of triremes, sent out forty of them together with generals.2 [3] Although these were at odds with one another, they sailed off to Oropus, for the enemy's triremes lay at anchor there. In the battle which followed the Lacedaemonians were victorious and captured twenty-two vessels. [4]

After the Syracusans had brought to an end the war with the Athenians, they honoured with the booty taken in the war the Lacedaemonians who had fought with them under the command of Gylippus, and they sent back with them to Lacedaemon, to aid them in the war against the Athenians, an allied force of thirty-five triremes under the command of Hermocrates, their foremost citizen. [5] And as for themselves, after gathering the spoil that accrued from the war, they embellished their temples with dedications and with arms taken from the enemy and honoured with the appropriate gifts those soldiers who had fought with distinction. [6] After this Diocles, who was the most influental among them of the leaders of the populace, persuaded the citizens to change their form of government so that the administration would be conducted by magistrates chosen by lot and that lawgivers also should be elected for organizing the polity and drafting new laws privately.

1 412 B.C.

2 Diodorus is most sketchy at this point and in the repetitive passage in chap. 36. A Peloponnesian fleet had been lying off Salamis, possibly hoping to be able to attack the Peiraeus in the midst of the political confusion in Athens; it had then sailed on to Euboea, which was of the utmost importance to Athens now that all Attica was exposed to the Spartan troops stationed in Deceleia. See Thucydides, 8.94-95.

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.

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