32.
Accordingly he sailed from Embatum along the coast, touching at Myonnesus in the
terriory1 of Teos; he there slew most of the captives whom he had taken on his voyage.
[2]
He then put into harbour at Ephesus, where a deputation from the Samians of Anaea2 came to him.
They told him that it was an ill manner of liberating Hellas, to have put to death men who were not his enemies and were not lifting a hand against him, but
were allies of Athens from necessity: if he went on in this way he would convert few of
his enemies into friends, and many of his friends into enemies.
[3]
He was convinced by them, and allowed such of the Chian prisoners as he had not yet put
to death and some others to go free.
They had been easily taken, because, when people saw the ships, instead of flying, they
came close up to them under the idea that they were Athenian; the thought never entered
into their minds that while the Athenians were masters of the sea, Peloponnesian ships
would find their way across the Aegean to the coast of Ionia.
Thucydides translated into English; with introduction, marginal analysis, notes, and indices. Volume 1. Thucydides. Benjamin Jowett. translator. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1881.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
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.