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1

When Demotion was archon in Athens, the Romans elected as consuls Publius Valerius Publicola and Gaius Nautius Rufus. In this year the Athenians, electing as general Cimon the son of Miltiades and giving him a strong force, sent him to the coast of Asia to give aid to the cities which were allied with them and to liberate those which were still held by Persian garrisons. [2] And Cimon, taking along the fleet which was at Byzantium and putting in at the city which is called Eion,2 took it from the Persians who were holding it and captured by siege Scyros, which was inhabited by Pelasgians and Dolopes; and setting up an Athenian as the founder of a colony he portioned out the land in allotments.3 [3] After this, with a mind to begin greater enterprises, he put in at the Peiraeus, and after adding more triremes to his fleet and arranging for general supplies on a notable scale, he at that time put to sea with two hundred triremes; but later, when he had called for additional ships from the Ionians and everyone else, he had in all three hundred. [4] So sailing with the entire fleet to Caria he at once succeeded in persuading the cities on the coast which had been settled from Greece to revolt from the Persians, but as for the cities whose inhabitants spoke two languages4 and still had Persian garrisons, he had recourse to force and laid siege to them; then, after he had brought over to his side the cities of Caria, he likewise won over by persuasion those of Lycia. [5] Also, by taking additional ships from the allies, who were continually being added, he still further increased the size of his fleet.

Now the Persians had composed their land forces from their own peoples, but their navy they had gathered from both Phoenicia and Cyprus and Cilicia, and the commander of the Persian armaments was Tithraustes, who was an illegitimate son of Xerxes. [6] And when Cimon learned that the Persian fleet was lying off Cyprus, sailing against the barbarians he engaged them in battle, pitting two hundred and fifty ships against three hundred and forty. A sharp struggle took place and both fleets fought brilliantly, but in the end the Athenians were victorious, having destroyed many of the enemy ships and captured more than one hundred together with their crews. [7] The rest of the ships escaped to Cyprus, where their crews left them and took to the land, and the ships, being bare of defenders, fell into the hands of the enemy.

1 470 B.C.

2 In describing the successes of Cimon, Diodorus has compressed the events of some ten years into one; Eion was taken in 476 B.C. and the battle of the Eurymedon took place in 467 or 466 B.C.

3 This was an Athenian cleruchy, which differed from a colony in that the cleruchists did not lose their Athenian citizenship and did not necessarily reside on their allotments.

4 It is to be presumed that Greek was their second language and so they were non-Greek or at least mixed in race.

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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