previous next
1

At the end of the year the Athenians bestowed the office of archon upon Euctemon and the Romans elected as consuls Marcus Papirius and Spurius Nautius, and the Ninety-third Olympiad was celebrated, that in which Eubatus of Cyrene won the "stadion." About this time the Athenian generals, now that they had taken possession of Byzantium, proceeded against the Hellespont and took every one of the cities of that region with the exception of Abydus.2 [2] Then they left Diodorus and Mantitheus in charge with an adequate force and themselves sailed to Athens with the ships and the spoils, having performed many great deeds for the fatherland. When they drew near the city, the populace in a body, overjoyed at their successes, came out to meet them, and great numbers of the aliens, as well as children and women, flocked to the Peiraeus. [3] For the return of the generals gave great cause for amazement, in that they brought no less than two hundred captured vessels, a multitude of captive soldiers, and a great store of spoils; and their own triremes they had gone to great care to embellish with gilded arms and garlands and, besides, with spoils and all such decorations. But most men thronged to the harbours to catch sight of Alcibiades, so that the city was entirely deserted, the slaves vying with the free. [4] For at that time it had come to pass that this man was such an object of admiration that the leading Athenians thought that they had at long last found a strong man capable of opposing the people openly and boldly, while the poor had assumed that they would have in him an excellent supporter who would recklessly throw the city into confusion and relieve their destitute condition. [5] For in boldness he far excelled all other men, he was a most eloquent speaker, in generalship he was unsurpassed, and in daring he was most successful; furthermore, in appearance he was exceedingly handsome and in spirit brilliant and intent upon great enterprises. [6] In a word, practically all men had conceived such assumptions regarding him that they believed that along with his return from exile good fortune in their undertakings had also come again to the city. Furthermore, just as the Lacedaemonians enjoyed success while he was fighting on their side, so they expected that they in turn would again prosper when they had this man as an ally.

1 408 B.C.

2 The Lacedaemonian base.

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.
Hellespont (Turkey) (1)
Cyrene (Libya) (1)
Byzantium (Turkey) (1)
Athens (Greece) (1)
Abydos (Egypt) (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.
408 BC (1)
hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: