previous next
1

When Euphemus was archon in Athens, in Rome in place of consuls military tribunes were elected, Lucius Furius, Lucius Quinctius, and Aulus Sempronius. In this year the Lacedaemonians and their allies took the field against Argolis and captured the stronghold of Hysiae,2 and slaying the inhabitants they razed the fortress to the ground; and when they learned that the Argives had completed the construction of the long walls clear to the sea,3 they advanced there, razed the walls that had been finished, and then made their way back home. [2]

The Athenians chose Alcibiades general, and giving him twenty ships commanded him to assist the Argives in establishing the affairs of their government; for conditions were still unsettled among them because many still remained of those who preferred the aristocracy. [3] So when Alcibiades had arrived at the city of the Argives and had consulted with the supporters of the democracy, he selected those Argives who were considered to be the strongest adherents of the Lacedaemonian cause; these he removed from the city,4 and when he had assisted in establishing the democracy on a firm basis, he sailed back to Athens. [4]

Toward the end of the year the Lacedaemonians invaded Argolis with a strong force, and after ravaging a large part of the country they settled the exiles from Argos in Orneae5; this place they fortified as a stronghold against Argolis, and leaving in it a strong garrison, they ordered it to harass the Argives. [5] But when the Lacedaemonians had withdrawn from Argolis, the Athenians dispatched to the Argives a supporting force of forty triremes and twelve hundred hoplites. The Argives then advanced against Orneae together with the Athenians and took the city by storm, and of the garrison and exiles some they put to death and others they expelled from Orneae.

These, then, were the events of the fifteenth year of the Peloponnesian War.

1 417 B.C.

2 In Argolis near the Laconian border.

3 The walls were to connect Argos and the sea. This was an enormous undertaking and the walls were certainly not yet completed (cp. below and Thuc. 5.82.5).

4 They were distributed among the islands of the Athenian Empire.

5 In north-west Argolis on the border of Phlius.

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.
Argolis (Greece) (6)
Athens (Greece) (2)
Argos (Greece) (2)
Rome (Italy) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
417 BC (1)
hide References (6 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: