previous next

Although the Lacedaemonians had entirely lost not only their sea force but Mindarus, the commander, together with it, nevertheless they did not let their spirits sink, but they chose as admiral Lysander, a man who was believed to excel all others in skill as a general and who possessed a daring that was ready to meet every situation. As soon as Lysander assumed the command he enrolled an adequate number of soldiers from the Peloponnesus and also manned as many ships as he was able. [2] Sailing to Rhodes he added to his force the ships which the cities of Rhodes possessed, and then sailed to Ephesus and Miletus. After equipping the triremes in these cities he summoned those which were supplied by Chios and thus fitted out at Ephesus a fleet of approximately seventy ships. [3] And hearing that Cyrus,1 the son of King Darius, had been dispatched by his father to aid the Lacedaemonians in the war, he went to him at Sardis, and stirring up the youth's2 enthusiasm for the war against the Athenians he received on the spot ten thousand darics3 for the pay of his soldiers; and for the future Cyrus told him to make requests without reserve, since, as he stated, he carried orders from his father to supply the Lacedaemonians with whatever they should want. [4] Then Lysander, returning to Ephesus, called to him the most influential men of the cities, and arranging with them to form cabals he promised that if his undertakings were successful he would put each group in control of its city. And it came to pass for this reason that these men, vying with one another, gave greater aid than was required of them and that Lysander was quickly supplied in starting fashion with all the equipment that is useful in war.

1 Cyrus the Younger, whose later attempt to win the Persian throne is told in Xenophon's Anabasis. Persia had finally decided to throw its power behind the combatant which could not support a fleet without Persian assistance. Cyrus was sent down as "caranus (lord) of all those whose mustering-place is Castolus" (a plain probably near Sardis), i.e. as governor-general of Asia Minor (Xen. Hell. 1.4.3) with abundant funds and orders to support the Lacedaemonians in the war. This decision of the Great King was the death-knell of the Athenian Empire.

2 Cyrus was seventeen years of age.

3 A Persian coin containing about 125 grains of gold, worth approximately one pound sterling or five dollars.

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.
Ephesus (Turkey) (3)
Sardis (Turkey) (2)
Rhodes (Greece) (2)
Persia (Iran) (1)
Peloponnesus (Greece) (1)
Miletus (Turkey) (1)
Asia Minor (Turkey) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (6 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: