previous next
1

At the close of this year, in Athens Diophantus entered upon the archonship, and in Rome, in place of consuls, the consular magistracy was exercised by six military tribunes, Lucius Valerius, Marcus Furius, Quintus Servilius, and Quintus Sulpicius.2 After these men had assumed their magistracies the Boeotians and Athenians, together with the Corinthians and the Argives, concluded an alliance with each other. [2] It was their thought that, since the Lacedaemonians were hated by their allies because of their harsh rule, it would be an easy matter to overthrow their supremacy, given that the strongest states were of one mind. First of all, they set up a common Council in Corinth to which they sent representatives to form plans, and worked out in common the arrangements for the war. Then they dispatched ambassadors to the cities and caused many allies of the Lacedaemonians to withdraw from them; [3] for at once all of Euboea and the Leucadians joined them, as well as the Acarnanians, Ambraciots, and the Chalcidians of Thrace. [4] They also attempted to persuade the inhabitants of the Peloponnesus to revolt from the Lacedaemonians, but no one listened to them; for Sparta, lying as it does along the side of it, was a kind of citadel and fortress of the entire Peloponnesus. [5]

Medius, the lord of Larissa in Thessaly, was at war with Lycophron, the tyrant of Pherae, and when he asked for aid to be sent him, the Council dispatched to him two thousand soldiers. [6] After the troops had arrived Medius seized Pharsalus, in which there was a garrison of Lacedaemonians, and sold the inhabitants as booty. After this the Boeotians and Argives, parting company with Medius, seized Heracleia in Trachis; and on being admitted at night within the walls by certain persons, they put to the sword the Lacedaemonians whom they seized but allowed the other Peloponnesians to leave with their possessions. [7] They then summoned to the city the Trachinians whom the Lacedaemonians had banished from their homes,3 and gave them the city as their dwelling place; and indeed they were the most ancient settlers of this territory. After this Ismenias, the leader of the Boeotians, left the Argives in the city to serve as its garrison and himself persuaded the Aenianians and the Athamanians to revolt from the Lacedaemonians and gathered soldiers from among them and their allies. After he had recruited a little less than six thousand men, he took the field against the Phocians. [8] While he was taking up quarters in Naryx in Locris, which men say was the birthplace of Ajax, the people of the Phocians came against him in arms under the command of Alcisthenes the Laconian. [9] A sharp and protracted battle followed, in which the Boeotians were the victors. Pursuing the fugitives until nightfall, they slew not many less than a thousand, but lost of their own troops in the battle about five hundred. [10] After the pitched battle both sides dismissed their armies to their native lands, and the members of the Council in Corinth, since affairs were progressing as they desired, gathered to Corinth soldiers from all the cities, more than fifteen thousand infantry and about five hundred cavalry.

1 395 B.C.

2 Livy 5.14.5 adds M. Valerius and L. Furius.

3 See chap. 38.4-5.

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.

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.
395 BC (1)
hide References (15 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: