previous next

While these events were taking place, the Lacedaemonians determined to make war upon Mantineia, without regard to the standing treaty,1 for the following reasons. The Greeks were enjoying the general peace of Antalcidas, in accordance with which all the cities had got rid of their garrisons and recovered by agreement their autonomy. The Lacedaemonians, however, who by their nature loved to command and by policy preferred war, would not tolerate the peace which they considered to be a heavy burden, and longing for their past dominance over Greece, they were poised and alert to begin a new movement. [2] At once, then, they stirred up the cities and formed partisan groups in them with the aid of their friends, being provided in some of the cities with plausible grounds for interference. For the cities, after having recovered their autonomy, demanded an accounting of the men who had been in control under the Lacedaemonian supremacy; and since the procedure was harsh, because the people bore enmity for past injuries and many were sent into exile, the Lacedaemonians took it upon themselves to give support to the defeated faction. [3] By receiving these men and dispatching a force with them to restore them to their homes, they at first enslaved the weaker cities, but afterward made war on and forced the more important cities to submit, having preserved the general peace no longer than two years.

Seeing that the city of the Mantineians lay upon their borders and was full of valiant men, the Lacedaemonians were jealous of its growth which had resulted from the peace and were bent on humbling the pride of its citizens. [4] First of all, therefore, they dispatched ambassadors to Mantineia, commanding them to destroy their walls and all of them to remove to the original five villages from which they had of old united to form Mantineia. When no one paid any attention to them, they sent out an army and laid siege to the city. [5] The Mantineians dispatched ambassadors to Athens, asking for aid. When the Athenians did not choose to make a breach of the common peace, the Mantineians none the less withstood the siege on their own account and stoutly resisted the enemy. In this way, then, fresh wars got a start in Greece.

1 Referring to the Peace of Antalcidas (Book 14.110.3).

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 (4 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: