previous next

Also in Ionia the Greeks fought a great battle with the Persians on the same day as that which took place in Plataea, and since we propose to describe it, we shall take up the account of it from the beginning. [2] Leotychides the Lacedaemonian and Xanthippus1 the Athenian, the commanders of the naval force, after the battle of Salamis collected the fleet in Aegina, and after spending some days there they sailed to Delos with two hundred and fifty triremes. And while they lay at anchor there, ambassadors came to them from Samos asking them to liberate the Greeks of Asia. [3] Leotychides took counsel with the commanders, and after they had heard all the Samians had to say, they decided to undertake to liberate the cities and speedily sailed forth from Delos. When the Persian admirals, who were then at Samos, learned that the Greeks were sailing against them, they withdrew from Samos with all their ships, and putting into port at Mycale in Ionia they hauled up their ships, since they saw that the vessels were unequal to offering battle, and threw about them a wooden palisade and a deep ditch; despite these defences they also summoned land forces from Sardis and the neighbouring cities and gathered in all about one hundred thousand men. Furthermore, they made ready all the other equipment that is useful in war, believing that the Ionians also would go over to the enemy. [4] Leotychides advanced with all the fleet ready for action against the barbarians at Mycale, dispatching in advance a ship carrying a herald who had the strongest voice of anyone in the fleet. This man had been ordered to sail up to the enemy and to announce in a loud voice, "The Greeks, having conquered the Persians, are now come to liberate the Greek cities of Asia." [5] This Leotychides did in the belief that the Greeks in the army of the barbarians would revolt from the Persians and that great confusion would arise in the camp of the barbarians; and that is what actually happened. For as soon as the herald approached the ships which had been hauled up on the shore, and made the announcement as he had been ordered, it came about that the Persians lost confidence in the Greeks and that the Greeks began to agree among themselves about revolting.

1 The father of Pericles.

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.
Ionia (2)
Delos (Greece) (2)
Asia (2)
Sardis (Turkey) (1)
Plataea (1)
Aegina (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (2 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: