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1

When Glaucides was archon in Athens, the Romans elected as consuls Titus Quinctius and Agrippa Furius. During this year the Syracusans, because of the successes we have described, built one hundred triremes and doubled the number of their cavalry; they also developed their infantry forces and made financial preparations by laying heavier tributes upon the Siceli who were now subject to them. This they were doing with the intention of subduing all Sicily little by little. [2]

While these events were taking place it came about in Greece that the Corinthian War,2 as it is called, began for the following causes. Civil strife broke out among the Epidamnians who dwell upon the Adriatic Sea and are colonists of the Cercyraeans and Corinthians.3 The successful group sent into exile large numbers of their opponents, but the exiles gathered into one body, associated the Illyrians with themselves, and sailed together with them against Epidamnus. [3] Since the barbarians4 had taken the field with a large army, had seized the countryside, and were investing the city, the Epidamnians, who of themselves were not equal to them in battle, dispatched ambassadors to Cercyra, asking the Cercyraeans on the grounds of kinship to come to their aid. When the Cercyraeans paid no attention to the request, they sent ambassadors to seek an alliance with the Corinthians and declared Corinth to be their single mother-city; at the same time they asked for colonists. [4] And the Corinthians, partly out of pity for the Epidamnians and partly out of hatred for the Cercyraeans, since they alone of the colonists who had gone from Corinth would not send the customary sacrificial animals to the mother-city, decided to go to the aid of the Epidamnians. Consequently they sent to Epidamnus both colonists and soldiers in sufficient numbers to garrison the city. [5] At this the Cercyraeans became irritated and sent out a squadron of fifty triremes under the command of a general. He, sailing up to the city, issued orders to receive back the exiles, while they dispatched ambassadors to the guards from Corinth demanding that the question of the origin of the colony be decided by a court of arbiters, not by war. When the Corinthians made no answer to this proposal, both sides decided upon war, and they set about fitting out great naval armaments and gathering allies. And so the Corinthian War, as it has been called, broke out for the reasons we have narrated. [6]

The Romans were at war with the Volscians5 and at first they engaged only in skirmishes and unimportant engagements, but later they conquered them in a great pitched battle and slew the larger number of the enemy.

1 439 B.C.

2 The correct date is 435 B.C.

3 The Epidamnians were in fact colonists of Cercyra, which was a colony of Corinth.

4 The Illyrians.

5 Cp. Livy 3.66.

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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