Summer was now over. The winter following, a battle took place between the Heracleots in Trachis and the Aenianians, Dolopians, Malians, and certain of the Thessalians, all tribes bordering on and hostile to the Heracleots’ town, which directly menaced their country.
Tag: Thucydides
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At this point in the narrative (Book II of a total of VIII, self will probably speed up the pace the closer she gets to the end), Athens is still the Master of the Universe, and all the other city-states are just upstarts. But something happens in the fifth year of the war that shakes Athens’ complacency, and it has to do with an ally, Corcyra.
Someone named Peithias, a volunteer proxenus of Athens, had convened a meeting of the city council of Corcyra when a band of citizens, “armed with daggers,” suddenly burst “into the council chamber” and “killed Peithias and sixty others.”
WHAAAAT?!!!
There was an Athenian galley sitting in the harbor, luckily, because the survivors of the massacre were able to take refuge there.
Fearing the wrath of Athens, the conspirators “sent envoys to Athens to justify what had been done” but “upon the arrival of the Embassy the Athenians arrested the envoys.”
Self would like to point out that the conspirators were not just some troublesome riff-raff opportunists, but were the richest citizens of Corcyra. They saw an advantage to themselves, and implemented their plan, which placed them in direct opposition to “the commons” or common people.
“The next day the Athenian general, Nicostratus, son of Diitrephes, came up from Naupactus with twelve ships and five hundred Messenian heavy infantry.” So Athens was not going to take this rebellion lightly. Besides, murder is murder. And sixty people is no trifling number. And the sixty were murdered in council chambers yet!
This is such a fascinating book.
Stay tuned.
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Sorry, you’re just going to have to put up with self going on about ancient Greece and the Athenians and the Peloponnesians for a while because self is only on Book II (out of eight)
Can you believe summer’s over? And she didn’t even get to go to Cal Shakes. Not once.
Anyhoo, the Peloponnesian advance is extremely slow. So slow that the Athenians have plenty of time to have its people evacuate to the city (and they managed to take a lot of their property with them) The Peloponnesians got stuck at a border town called Oenoe which, being a border town, was of course walled. They were led by a man named Archidamus.
. . . after he had assaulted Oenoe, and every possible attempt to take it had failed, as no herald came from Athens, he at last broke up his camp and invaded Attica. This was about eighty days after the Theban attempt upon Plataea, just in the middle of summer, when the corn was ripe and Archimadus son of Zeuxidamus, king of Lacedaemon, was in command.
— the peloponnesian war, book IISelf just loves this sentence: “This was about eighty days after the Theban attempt upon Plataea, just in the middle of summer, when the corn was ripe . . .”
SWOON!
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Self found Book I quite a yawn, frankly (aside from the part about how everyone decided to go nekkid during wrestling competitions, a practice begun by the Lacaedemonians, who were enemies of Athens. Why this is even in Book I is a mystery, but let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth)
Anyhoo, Book II begins with the beginning of hostilities between Athens and the Peloponnesians. It’s a very exciting tale. The Thebans decided to take the city of Potidaea, which was an ally of Athens. They were aided in their plot by traitors, who opened the gates to the invaders at night, when most of the citizens were asleep. Anyhoo, the citizens roused soon enough, and realized the enemy was in their midst. They might have said, “All is up with us” and decided to surrender, but (and self finds this believable only because of Ukraine), they decided to fight.
It was still night, though daybreak was at hand: in daylight it was thought that their attack would be met by men full of courage and on equal terms with their assailants, while in darkness it would fall upon troops panic-stricken, who would also be at a disadvantage from their enemy’s knowledge of the locality. So they made their assault at once, and came to close quarters as quickly as they could.
Twice or thrice the Thebans beat back their assailants. But the men shouted and charged them, the women and slaves screamed and yelled from the houses and pelted them with stones and tiles — and besides, it had been raining hard all night — and so at last their courage gave way, and they turned and fled through the town. Most of the fugitives were quite ignorant of the right ways out, and this, together with the mud, and the darkness caused by the moon being in her last quarter, and the fact that their pursuers knew their way about and could easily stop their escape, proved fatal to many. The only gate open was the one by which they had entered, and this was shut by one of the Plataeans driving the spike of a javelin into the bar instead of the bolt; so even here there was no longer any means of exit.
— the peloponnesian war, book 11: beginning of the peloponnesian war, first invasion of attica -
There is such weight and sonority in the telling of this part of The Peloponnesian War (There are eight books in all; the eighth is unfinished) Because of what’s happening right now in America, self can’t help seeing through a particular lens, the lens of Thucydides.
Warning: The second sentence of the excerpt is super-long but also super-great. May the name of the traitor Naucleides be remembered with shame!
Thucydides names every single traitor, and even their fathers.
The thirty years’ war which was entered into after the conquest of Euboea lasted fourteen years. In the fifteenth, in the forty-eighth year of the priestess-ship of Chysis at Argos, in the ephorate of Aenesias at Sparta, in the last month but two of the archonship of Pythodorus at Athens, and six months after the battle of Potidaea, just at the beginning of spring, a Theban force of a little over three hundred strong, under the command of their Beotarchs, Pythangelus, son of Phyleides, and Diemporus, son of Onetorides, about the first watch of the night, made an armed entry into Platea, a town of Beotia in alliance with Athens. The gates were opened to them by a Plataean named Naucleides, who, with his party, had invited them in, meaning to put to death the citizens of the opposite party, bring over the city to Thebes, and thus obtain power for themselves. This was arranged through Eurymachus, son of Leontiades, a person of great influence at Thebes.
— The peloponnesian war, book iiStay tuned.
Kanlaon 