Hellespont

Megabazus, bringing with him the Paeonians, came to the Hellespont, and after crossing it from there, he came to Sardis.

As soon as Darius had crossed the Hellespont and come to Sardis, he remembered the good service done him by Histiaeus of Miletus and the counsel of Coes the Mytilenaean, and after sending for them to come to Sardis, he offered them a choice of whatever they wanted.

They sailed to the Hellespont and made Byzantium and all the other cities of that region subject to themselves.

Akamas and the warrior Peirous commanded the Thracians and those that came from beyond the mighty stream of the Hellespont.

In like manner, if Apollo grant me glory and I slay your champion, I will strip him of his armor and take it to the city of Ilion, where I will hang it in the temple of Apollo, but I will give up his body, that the Achaeans may bury him at their ships, and the build him a tomb [ sêma] by the wide waters of the Hellespont.

tomorrow morning, if you care to look, you will see my ships on the Hellespont, and my men rowing out to sea with might and main.

After this Tissaphernes came to the Hellespont;

Meanwhile the Athenians at Sestus, learning that Mindarus was planning to sail against them with sixty ships, withdrew by night to Cardia.

Shortly after this, at the beginning of the winter, Dorieus, the son of Diagoras, sailed into the Hellespont from Rhodes with fourteen ships, arriving at daybreak.

When Pausanias the Lacedaemonian, after being sent for by the Spartans for the first time from his command in the Hellespont, and brought to trial, was acquitted by them as not guilty, he was not sent out again in a public capacity;

The same summer, when Antandrus was going to be strengthened by the Mytilenaeans, as they were planning [when we last mentioned them], Demodocus and Aristides, the commanders of the ships sent to levy contributions, being about the Hellespont, (for Lamachus, their third colleague, had sailed with ten ships into the Pontus,) became aware of the provisions made for the place, and thinking there was …

Agis, on the contrary, seeing that the Lacedaemonians were determined to send to Chios first, did not himself maintain any different view;

though they might have reached the Hellespont in ten or perhaps in three or four days, and rescued the outposts by receiving the oaths of ratification before Philip captured them.

But here was a man annexing Euboea and making it a basis of operations against Attica, attacking Megara, occupying Oreus, demolishing Porthmus, establishing the tyranny of Philistides at Oreus and of Cleitarchus at Eretria, subjugating the Hellespont, besieging Byzantium, destroying some of the Greek cities, reinstating exiled traitors in others:

In the archonship of Neocles, in the month Boedromion, at an extraordinary meeting of the Assembly convened by the Generals, Eubulus, son of Mnesitheus, of Coprus, proposed that, whereas the generals have announced in the assembly that the admiral Leodamas and the twenty ships under his command, sent to the Hellespont to convoy corn, have been removed to Macedon by Philip’s officer, Amyntas, and a …

I at once called upon you, and told the envoys, to sail for the Hellespont as speedily as possible, and not to abandon, or allow Philip to seize and hold, any of the positions there in the meantime;

Yet no man could point out two places in the whole world of more importance to the commonwealth than Thermopylae by land and the Hellespont by sea;

To prove, moreover, that we should have caught Philip at the Hellespont, if my advice had been taken and your directions obeyed in the terms of the decrees, call the witnesses who were there present.

"He never represented them as tasting fish, and that though they were encamped beside the sea—calling the Hellespont, as it is, 'rich in fish' on each occasion;

" But after the Hellespont and Lysander, it is a shame.

In fact, after the disaster which befell us in the Hellespont, when our rivals took our place as leaders, the barbarians won a naval victory, became rulers of the sea, occupied most of the islands, made a landing in Laconia, took Cythera by storm, and sailed around the whole Peloponnesus, inflicting damage as they went.

What orator, however eager to overshoot the mark, has not fallen short of the truth in speaking of this king, who rose to such a pitch of arrogance that, thinking it a small task to subjugate Hellas, and proposing to leave a memorial such as would mark a more than human power, did not stop until he had devised and compelled the execution of a plan whose fame is on the lips of all mankind—a plan by …

When, however, the ephors changed their minds for some reason or other and, after he had already gone, tried to turn him back from the Isthmus of Corinth, at that point he declined to render further obedience, but went sailing off to the Hellespont.

and it was reported that his own successor as admiral, Polus, had by this time all but reached the Hellespont.

or the story of the generalship of Cephisodotus, and the naval expedition to the Hellespont, when Demosthenes as one of the trierarchs carried the general on his ship, and shared his table, his sacrifices, and his libations and how after he had been thus honored because the general was an old friend of his father’s, he did not hesitate, when the general was impeached, and was on trial for his life …

It happened that he had at that time sailed to the Hellespont as treasurer to the general Timomachus, of the deme Acharnae;

But about the same time, while, as I have said, he was staying with Pittalacus, here comes Hegesandrus, back again from the Hellespont.

others of sailing up the Hellespont, or of crossing to Ionia:

To begin with, when we lost our fleet on the Hellespont and were shut within our walls, what did our present allies, who were then on the Spartan side, propose to do with us?

Just as, if Xerxes — when with such great fleets and such great forces of horse and foot, the Hellespont bridged, Athos pierced through, he had walked the sea and sailed the land — if, when he had come into Greece with so great an onset, someone should ask him the cause of such great forces and so great a war, and he should say that he had wished to carry off honey from Hymettus, he would surely s …

Observe from and to what points he crossed the straits;

Since that time, so long as you had forces in the Hellespont, he has continually flattered you and cozened you;

You will find proof in his route across the straits that he had already decided on this action at the time when he was in Asia and was sending you the letter, and therefore that he was cheating you;

And, if they do not enter Pontus, but remain in the Hellespont ten days after the rising of the dogstar, and disembark their goods at a port where the Athenians have no right of reprisals, and from thence complete their voyage to Athens, let them pay the interest written into the contract the year before.

In the second place, will you not wrong Archebius and Heraclides, who by putting Byzantium into the hands of Thrasybulus made you masters of the Hellespont, so that you farmed out the toll of ten per cent, and thus being well furnished with money forced the Lacedaemonians to conclude a peace favorable to you?

Timomachus himself came on board my ship, and sailed around here and there until he reached the Hellespont.

Further, I sent Euctemon, the pentecontarch, to Lampsacus, giving him money and letters to friends of my father, and bade him hire for me the best sailors he could.

For I received no pay from the general for the space of eight months, and I sailed home to Peiraeus with the ambassadors because my ship was the fastest sailer, and again, when I was ordered by the people to take Menon the general to the Hellespont to replace Autocles, who had been removed from his command, I set sail on short notice from Athens.

This is just what happened when we heard that Philip was in the Hellespont and again when the pirate triremes put in at Marathon.

That, too, is the meaning of the dispatch of a second general to the Hellespont.

Do you not observe and consider, men of Athens, what season of the year is upon us—the season at which certain people think it their duty to keep the Hellespont clear of you and hand it over to Philip?

Yes, you may say, as to that indeed the speakers are proved wrong, but the mercenaries are really acting abominably in ravaging the shores of the Hellespont, and Diopithes is wrong in detaining the merchantmen, and we must not sanction it.

Our mutual hostility has become so acute that, when I wanted to convey my fleet to the Hellespont, I was compelled to escort it with my army through the Chersonese, because your settlers there were at war with us in accordance with the decree of Polycrates, backed up by your resolutions, and your general was inciting the Byzantines and publicly announcing that your orders were to make war on me, if he got the chance.

but he is off to the Hellespont, just as before he hurried to Ambracia;

In the alienation of the Hellespont, in the control of Megara and Euboea by one who is at war with you, and in the defection of the Peloponnesians to his side.

"Over these the host of the Argives built a noble tomb, on a point jutting out over the open Hellespont, that it might be seen from far out upon the sea by those now living and by them that shall be born hereafter.

Now when the city had lost its ships in the Hellespont and was shorn of its power, I so far surpassed the majority of the trierarchs that I was one of the very few who saved their ships: