Page:Thucydides, translated into English Vol 1.djvu/267

 66-68] WAR BETWEEN AMBRACIA AND AMPHILOCHIA 151 an Athenian citizen =", to deliver the envoys into their hands, that they might not find their way to the King and so injure a city which was in some degree his own. He con- sented, and, sending a body of men with Learchus and Ameiniades, before they embarked, as they were on their way through Thrace to the vessel in which they were going to cross the Hellespont, seized them ; they were then, in accordance with the orders of Sadocus, handed over to the Athenian envoys, who conveyed them to Athens. On the very day of their arrival the Athenians, fearing that Aristeus, whom they considered to be the cause of all their troubles at Potidaea and in Chalcidice, would do them still further mischief if he escaped, put them all to death without trial and without hearing what they wanted to say ; they then threw their bodies down precipices. They considered that they had a right to retaliate on the Lacedaemonians, who had begun by treating in the same way the traders of the Athenians and their allies when they caught their vessels off the coast of Peloponnesus. For at the com- mencement of the war, all whom the Lacedaemonians captured at sea were treated by them as enemies and indiscriminately slaughtered, whether they were allies of the Athenians or neutrals. About the end of the same summer the Ambraciots, 68 with a large Barbarian force which The Amhradots make they had called out, made war upon imr ivuhottt success up- A 1 -1 1 • A J „ A v^-, o» the AmftliilucliiaH the Amphilochian Argos and upon Am- "" ' ^ ^ r u • Argtves. philochia. The original cause ot their enmity against the Argives was as follows :— The Amphi- lochian territory had been occupied and the city founded by Amphilochus the son of Amphiaraus, who on returning home after the Trojan War was dissatisfied at the state of Argos. He fixed the site on the shore of the Ambracian Gulf, and called the new city by the name of his native place; it was the greatest city in that region, and its " Cp. ii. 29 fin.