Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:
book:
chapter:
Contents of the Eleventh Book of Diodorus
chapter 1chapter 2chapter 3chapter 4chapter 5chapter 6chapter 7chapter 8chapter 9chapter 10chapter 11chapter 12chapter 13chapter 14chapter 15chapter 16chapter 17chapter 18chapter 19chapter 20chapter 21chapter 22chapter 23chapter 24chapter 25chapter 26chapter 27chapter 28chapter 29chapter 30chapter 31chapter 32chapter 33chapter 34chapter 35chapter 36chapter 37chapter 38chapter 39chapter 40chapter 41chapter 42chapter 43chapter 44chapter 45chapter 46chapter 47chapter 48chapter 49chapter 50chapter 51chapter 52chapter 53chapter 54chapter 55chapter 56chapter 57chapter 58chapter 59chapter 60chapter 61chapter 62chapter 63chapter 64chapter 65chapter 66chapter 67chapter 68chapter 69chapter 70chapter 71chapter 72chapter 73chapter 74chapter 75chapter 76chapter 77chapter 78chapter 79chapter 80chapter 81chapter 82chapter 83chapter 84chapter 85chapter 86chapter 87chapter 88chapter 89chapter 90chapter 91chapter 92
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Now that we have spoken at sufficient length of the valour of these men we shall
resume the course of our narrative. Xerxes, now that he had gained the passes in the manner we
have described and had won, as the proverb runs, a "Cadmeian victory,"1 had
destroyed only a few of the enemy, while he had lost great numbers of his own troops. And after
he had become master of the passes by means of his land forces, he resolved to make trial of
contest at sea.
[2]
At once, therefore, summoning the commander of
the fleet, Megabates, he ordered him to sail against the naval force of the Greeks and to make
trial, with all his fleet, of a sea-battle against them.
[3]
And
Megabates, in accordance with the king's orders, set out from Pydne in Macedonia with all the fleet and put in at a promontory of
Magnesia which bears the name of Sepias. At this
place a great wind arose and he lost more than three hundred warships and great numbers of
cavalry transports and other vessels. And when the wind ceased, he weighed anchor and put in at
Aphetae in Magnesia. From here he dispatched two hundred triremes, ordering the commanders to
take a roundabout course and, by keeping Euboea on the
right, to encircle the enemy.
[4]
The Greeks were stationed at Artemisium in
Euboea and had in all two hundred and eighty
triremes; of these ships one hundred and forty were Athenian and the remainder were furnished
by the rest of the Greeks. Their admiral was Eurybiades the Spartan, and Themistocles the
Athenian supervised the affairs of the fleet; for the latter, by reason of his sagacity and
skill as a general, enjoyed great favour not only with the Greeks throughout the fleet but also
with Eurybiades himself, and all men looked to him and harkened to him eagerly.
[5]
And when a meeting of the commanders of the ships was held to discuss
the engagement, the rest of them all favoured waiting to receive the advance of the enemy; but
Themistocles alone expressed the opposite opinion, showing them that it was to their advantage
to sail against the enemy with the whole fleet in one array; for in this way, he declared, they
would have the upper hand, attacking as they would with their ships in a single body an enemy
whose formation was broken by disorder, as it must be, for they would be issuing out of many
harbours at some distance apart. In the end the Greeks followed the opinion of Themistocles and
sailed against the enemy with the entire fleet.
[6]
And since the
barbarians put out from many harbours, at the outset Themistocles, engaging with the scattered
Persians, sank many ships and not a few he forced to turn in flight and pursued as far as the
land; but later, when the whole fleet had gathered and a fierce battle ensued, each side gained
the superiority in one part of the line but neither won a complete victory, and at nightfall
the engagement was broken off.
1 The reference is to the dearly won victory of the Thebans over the "Seven," described in Book 4.65. The phrase is defined by Diodorus himself in Book 22 fr. 6.
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
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.
show
Browse Bar
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.
Magnesia (Greece) (2)Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Euboea (Greece) (2)
Macedonia (Macedonia) (1)
Artemisium (1)
Aphetae (1)
Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.
hide
References (1 total)
- Cross-references to this page
(1):
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), ARTEMI´SIUM
hide
Search
hideStable Identifiers
hide
Display Preferences