Melians
group · 6 works · 8 mentions · 15 anchored passages
the Melians · Mel. · Melian commissioners · prisoners · the people of Melos
in the texts
Panathenaicus
A people cited as having suffered cruelty under Athenian power.
But I think that, while those who find these words distasteful to listen to will not deny that what I have said is the truth nor, again, will they be able to cite other activities of the Lacedaemonians through which they brought to pass many blessings to the Hellenes, yet they will attempt— as is ever their habit—to denounce our city, to recount the most offensive acts which transpired while she h …
I was speaking in reply to those who reproach us with the misfortunes of the Melians and of villages with like populations, not meaning that we had done no wrong in these instances, but trying to show that those who are the idols of these speakers have laid waste more and greater cities than the Athenians have done, in which connection I discussed the virtues of Agamemnon and Menelaus and Nestor, …
History of the Peloponnesian War
The people and city of Melos, a Lacedaemonian colony that resists Athenian subjection, debates its fate in the famous dialogue, endures a siege, and is ultimately destroyed and repopulated.
So on this point let the danger be left to us.
The commissioners of the Melians made this reply:
who put to death all the Melian adults they took, and made slaves of the children and women.
Against Alcibiades
The population of Melos, enslaved and largely killed at Alcibiades's urging, from among whom he purchased a captive woman.
He got himself a child by the very woman whom he had turned from a free citizen into a slave, whose father and kinsfolk he had put to death and whose city he had made a waste, that he might thereby make his son the deadly enemy of himself and of this city;
that is why our old men fight our battles, while our young men make speeches— they take Alcibiades as their model, Alcibiades who carries his villainy to such unheard-of lengths that, after recommending that the people of Melos be sold into slavery, he purchased a woman from among the prisoners and has since had a son by her, a child whose birth was more unnatural than that of Aegis—thus, since he …
Against Theocrines
The people of Melos, cited as a comparative example of a community fined for harboring pirates, invoked to argue that Theocrines deserves punishment all the more.
For surely, Moerocles, we are not now going to exact ten talents from the Melians in accordance with the terms of your decree, because they gave harborage to the pirates, and yet suffer this man to go free who has transgressed both your decree and the laws which maintain our state.
Panegyricus
The population of Melos, enslaved by Athens during its imperial rule, cited by critics as evidence of Athenian harshness.
and, in these speeches of theirs, they cast it in our teeth that we enslaved the Melians and destroyed the people of Scione.
and who, for all that, profess to follow the ways of Lacedaemon, when they practise the very opposite, and bewail the disasters of the Melians, when they have shamelessly inflicted irreparable wrongs upon their own citizens.
Hellenica
Colonists of the Lacedaemonians on Melos whom Athens had earlier destroyed, later restored by Lysander.
Meantime Lysander, upon reaching Aegina, restored the state to the Aeginetans, gathering together as many of them as he could, and he did the same thing for the Melians also and for all the others who had been deprived of their native states.
and during that night no one slept, all mourning, not for the lost alone, but far more for their own selves, thinking that they would suffer such treatment as they had visited upon the Melians, colonists of the Lacedaemonians, after reducing them by siege, and upon the Histiaeans and Scionaeans and Toronaeans and Aeginetans and many other Greek peoples.