previous next

Now many of the other cities for the aforesaid reason were prompted to fall away to Athens; and the first to join in the alliance and the most eager were the cities of Euboea excepting Hestiaea1; for Hestiaea, having been treated most generously by the Lacedaemonians while she had suffered terribly in war with the Athenians, had very good reason for maintaining unabated her enmity to Athens and for continuing to observe inviolate her pledge to Sparta. [2] Nevertheless seventy cities eventually entered into alliance with the Athenians and participated on equal footing in the common council. So with the constant increase in the strength of the Athenians and the diminution of that of the Lacedaemonians the two states were now well matched. The Athenians, seeing affairs proceeding to their liking, dispatched a force to Euboea to serve at once as a protection for their allies and to subdue the opposition. [3] In Euboea a short time before this a certain Neogenes with the assistance of Jason of Pherae had gathered soldiers and occupied the citadel of Hestiaea,2 and so appointed himself tyrant of this country and of the city of the Oreitans. Because of his violent and arrogant rule the Lacedaemonians had then dispatched Theripides against him. [4] Theripides at first endeavoured to prevail upon the tyrant by reasoning with him to leave the citadel; but when the tyrant paid no heed to him, he rallied the people of the district to the cause of freedom, took the place by storm, and restored their freedom to the people of Oreus. For this reason the people who inhabit what is known as the country of the Hestiaeans continued to be loyal to the Spartans and preserved intact their friendship. [5] Chabrias, in command of the force dispatched by the Athenians,3laid waste Hestiaeotis, and, fortifying its Metropolis, as it is called, which is situated on a naturally steep hill, left a garrison in it, and then sailed to the Cyclades and won over Peparethos and Sciathos and some other islands which had been subject to the Lacedaemonians.

1 In the list of cities, IG, 2（2）. 1.43, Hestiaea appears as having joined later than the other cities of Euboea. For the treatment of Hestiaea under Pericles see Book 12.7.

2 Hestiaea, more often written Histiaea, a city on the north coast of Euboea, had a deme named Oreus (Theopom. in Strabo 10.1.3), situated to the west a few miles, which in Pericles' time received two thousand cleruchs and was officially known as Histiaea. The names became confused in antiquity. (See Richard Kiepert, p. 6 of text to Map XIV, Formae O.A.).

3 According to Plut. De Gloria Atheniensium 8, Timotheus, not Chabrias, freed Euboea.

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.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (6 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (4):
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), CHALCIS
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), O´REUS
    • Smith's Bio, Jason
    • Smith's Bio, Timo'theus
  • Cross-references in notes from this page (2):
    • Strabo, Geography, 10.1.3
    • Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium, 350f
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: