Solon

Plutarch

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. I. Perrin, Bernadotte, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.

This being done as he directed, the Megarians were lured on by what they saw, beached their vessel, and leapt out to attack women, as they supposed, vying with one another in speed. The result was that not a man of them escaped, but all were slain, and the Athenians at once set sail and took possession of the island.

Others, however, say that the island was not taken in his way, but that Solon first received this oracle from the god at Delphi:—

  1. The tutelary heroes of the land where once they lived, with sacred rites
  2. Propitiate, whom the Asopian plain now hides in its bosom;
  3. There they lie buried with their faces toward the setting sun.
Thereupon Solon sailed by night to the island and made sacrifices to the heroes Periphemus and Cychreus.

Then he took five hundred Athenian volunteers, a decree having been made that these should be supreme in the government of the island if they took it, and setting sail with a number of fishing boats convoyed by a thirty-oared ship, he anchored off the island of Salamis, at a point of land looking towards Euboea. But the Megarians in the city of Salamis, hearing only an uncertain report of what had happened, armed themselves hurriedly and set out for the place, at the same time dispatching a ship to spy out the enemy.