previous next

Mindarus, the Lacedaemonian admiral, after his flight to Abydus from the scene of his defeat repaired the ships that had been damaged and also sent the Spartan Epicles to the triremes at Euboea with orders to bring them with all speed. [2] When Epicles arrived at Euboea, he gathered the ships, which amounted to fifty, and hurriedly put out to sea; but when the triremes were off Mt. Athos there arose a storm of such fury that all the ships were lost and of their crews twelve men alone survived. [3] These facts are set forth by a dedication, as Ephorus states, which stands in the temple at Coroneia and bears the following inscription:“ These from the crews of fifty ships, escaping destruction,
Brought their bodies to land hard by Athos' sharp crags;
Only twelve, all the rest the yawning depth of the waters
Took to their death with their ships, meeting with terrible winds.
” [4]

At about the same time Alcibiades with thirteen triremes came by sea to the Athenians who were lying at Samos and had already heard that he had persuaded Pharnabazus not to come, as he had intended, with his three hundred ships to reinforce the Lacedaemonians. [5] And since the troops at Samos gave him a friendly welcome, he discussed with them the matter of his return from exile, offering promises to render many services to the fatherland; and in like manner he defended his own conduct and shed many tears over his own fortune, because he had been compelled by his enemies to give proof of his own valour at the expense of his native land.1

1 According to Thucydides (Thuc. 8.81) this meeting between Alcibiades and the Athenian fleet took place before the naval battle.

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.
Euboea (Greece) (2)
Athos (Greece) (1)
Abydos (Egypt) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (4 total)
  • Commentary references to this page (1):
    • T. G. Tucker, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 8, 8.107
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
  • Cross-references in notes from this page (1):
    • Thucydides, Histories, 8.81
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: