67.
In the end of the same summer, Aristeus of Corinth and Aneristus, Nicolaus, Stratodemus, and Timagorus of Tegea, ambassadors of the Lacedaemonians, and Pollis of Argos, a private man, as they were travelling into Asia to the king to get money of him and to draw him into their league, took Thrace in their way and came unto Sitalces the son of Teres with a desire to get him also, if they could, to forsake the league with Athens and to send his forces to Potidaea, which the Athenian army now besieged, and not to aid the Athenians any longer, and withal to get leave to pass through his country to the other side of the Hellespont to go, as they intended, to Pharnabazus the son of Pharnaces, who would convoy them to the king.
[2]
But the ambassadors of Athens, Learchus the son of Callimachus and Ameiniades the son of Philemon, then resident with Sitalces, persuaded Sadocus the son of Sitalces, who was now a citizen of Athens, to put them into their hands that they might not go to the king and do hurt to the city whereof he himself was now a member.
[3]
Whereunto condescending, as they journeyed through Thrace to take ship to cross the Hellespont, he apprehended them before they got to the ship by such others as he sent along with Learchus and Ameiniades with command to deliver them into their hands.
[4]
And they, when they had them, sent them away to Athens.
When they came thither, the Athenians, fearing Aristeus, lest escaping he should do them further mischief (for he was manifestly the author of all the business of Potidaea and about Thrace), the same day put them all to death, unjudged and desirous to have spoken, and threw them into the pits, thinking it but just to take revenge of the Lacedaemonians that began it and had slain and thrown into pits the merchants of the Athenians and their confederates whom they took sailing in merchant ships about the coast of Peloponnesus.
For in the beginning of the war, the Lacedaemonians slew as enemies whomsoever they took at sea, whether confederates of the Athenians or neutral, all alike.
The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Thucydides. Thomas Hobbes. translator. London. Bohn. 1843.
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