History of the Peloponnesian War

the King. But two Athenian envoys, Learchus son of Callimachus and Ameiniades son of Philemon, who chanced to be visiting Sitalces, urged Sadocus son of Sitalces, who had been made an Athenian citizen,[*](Thuc. 2.29.5.) to deliver the men into their hands, that they might not cross over to the King and do such injury as might be to his

adopted city.[*](Possibly τὴν ἐκείνου πόλιν τὸ μέρος means a city in a measure his own.)To this Sadocus agreed, and sending some troops to accompany Learchus and Ameiniades, seized them as they journeyed through Thrace before they embarked on the boat by which they were to cross the Hellespont. They were then, in accordance with his orders, delivered to the Athenian envoys, who took them and brought them

to Athens. When they arrived, the Athenians, in fear that Aristeus might escape and do them still more harm, because he had evidently been the prime mover in all the earlier intrigues at Potidaea and along the coast of Thrace, put them all to death on that very day without a trial, though they wished to say something in their own defence, and threw their bodies into a pit, thinking it justifiable to employ for their own protection the same measures as had in the first instance been used by the Lacedaemonians when they killed and cast into pits the traders of the Athenians and their allies whom they caught on board merchantmen on the coast of the Peloponnesus. For at the beginning of the war all persons whom the Lacedaemonians captured at sea they destroyed as enemies, whether they were fighting on the side of the Athenians or not even taking part on either side.

About the same time, as the summer was ending, the Ambraciots themselves, with many of the barbarians whom they had summoned to their standard, made an expedition against the Amphilochian Argos and the rest of Amphilochia.

And enmity between them and the Argives first began from the following circumstance.