The general account which Diodorus gives of this battle, is, even in its most essential features, not reconcilable with Thucydidês. It is vain to try to blend them. I have been able to borrow from Diodorus hardly anything except his statement of the superiority of the Athenian pilots and the Peloponnesian epibatæ. He states that twenty-five fresh ships arrived to join the Athenians in the middle of the battle, and determined the victory in their favor: this circumstance is evidently borrowed from the subsequent conflict a few months afterwards.
We owe to him, however, the mention of the chapel or tomb of Hecuba on the headland of Kynossêma.
[150] Thucyd. viii, 107; Diodor. xiii, 41.
[151] Diodor. xiii, 41. It is probable that this fleet was in great part Bœotian; and twelve seamen who escaped from the wreck commemorated their rescue by an inscription in the temple of Athênê at Korôneia; which inscription was read and copied by Ephorus. By an exaggerated and over-literal confidence in the words of it, Diodorus is led to affirm that these twelve men were the only persons saved, and that every other person perished. But we know perfectly that Hippokratês himself survived, and that he was alive at the subsequent battle of Kyzikus (Xenoph. Hellen. i, 1, 23).
[152] Diodor. xiii, 47. He places this event a year later, but I agree with Sievers in conceiving it as following with little delay on the withdrawal of the protecting fleet (Sievers, Comment. in Xenoph. Hellen. p. 9; note, p. 66).
See Colonel Leake’s Travels in Northern Greece, for a description of the Euripus, and the adjoining ground, with a plan, vol. ii, ch. xiv, pp. 259-265.
I cannot make out from Colonel Leake what is the exact breadth of the channel. Strabo talks in his time of a bridge reaching two hundred feet (x, p. 400). But there must have been material alterations made by the inhabitants of Chalkis during the time of Alexander the Great (Strabo, x, p. 447). The bridge here described by Diodorus, covering an open space broad enough for one ship, could scarcely have been more than twenty feet broad; for it was not at all designed to render the passage easy. The ancient ships could all lower their masts. I cannot but think that Colonel Leake (p. 259) must have read, in Diodorus, xiii, 47, οὐ in place of ὁ.
[153] Thucyd. viii, 107.
[154] Xenoph. Hellen. v, 1, 17. Compare a like exclamation, under nobler circumstances, from the Spartan Kallikratidas, Xenoph. Hellen. i, 6, 7; Plutarch, Lysander, c. 6.
[155] Thucyd. viii, 108; Diodor. xiii, 42.