History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Thucydides. The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Hobbes, Thomas. translator. London: John Bohn, 1843.

Being returned from Euboea, within awhile after they made a peace with the Lacedaemonians and their confederates for thirty years and rendered Nisaea, Achaia, Pegae, and Troezene (for these places the Athenians held of theirs) to the Peloponnesians.

In the sixth year of this peace fell out the war between the Samians and Milesians concerning Priene; and the Milesians, being put to the worse, came to Athens and exclaimed against the Samians. Wherein also certain private men of Samos itself took part with the Milesians out of desire to alter the form of government.

Whereupon the Athenians went to Samos with a fleet of forty galleys and set up the democracy there and took of the Samians fifty boys and as many men for hostages, which, when they had put into Lemnos and set a guard upon them, they came home.

But certain of the Samians (for some of them not enduring the popular government were fled into the continent) entering into a league with the mightiest of them in Samos and with Pissuthnes the son of Hystaspes, who then was governor of Sardis, and levying about seven hundred auxiliary soldiers, passed over into Samos in the evening and first set upon the popular faction and brought most of them into their power;

and then stealing their hostages out of Lemnos, they revolted and delivered the Athenian guard and such captains as were there into the hands of Pissuthnes, and withal prepared to make war against Miletus. With these also revolted the Byzantines.