History of the Peloponnesian War

Upon audience of these ambassadors the Lacedaemonians concluded to send out a colony, both intending the reparation of the injuries done to the Trachinians and to the Dorians and conceiving withal that the town would stand very commodiously for their war with the Athenians, inasmuch as they might thereby have a navy ready, where the passage was but short, against Euboea; and it would much further their conveyance of soldiers into Thrace. And they had their mind wholly bent to the building of the place. First, therefore, they asked counsel of the oracle in Delphi.

And the oracle having bidden them do it, they sent inhabitants thither, both of their own people and of the neighbours about them, and gave leave also to any that would to go thither out of the rest of Greece, save only to the Ionians, Achaeans, and some few other nations. The conductors of the colony were three Lacedaemonians, Leon, Alcidas, and Damagon.

Who, taking it in hand, built the city which is now called Heracleia from the very foundation, being distant from Thermopylae forty furlongs and from the sea twenty. Also they made houses for galleys to lie under, beginning close to Thermopylae against the very strait, to the end to have them the more defensible.

The Athenians, when this city was peopled, were at first afraid and thought it to be set up especially against Euboea; because from thence to Cenaeum, a promontory of Euboea, the passage is but short. But it fell out afterwards otherwise than they imagined; for they had no great harm by it, the reason whereof was this.

That the Thessalians, who had the towns of those parts in their power and upon whose ground it was built, afflicted these new planters with a continual war till they had worn them out, though they were many indeed in the beginning. For being the foundation of the Lacedaemonians, everyone went thither boldly, conceiving the city to be an assured one. And chiefly the governors themselves, sent hither from Lacedaemon, undid the business and dispeopled the city by fighting most men away, for that they governed severely and sometimes also unjustly, by which means their neighbours more easily prevailed against them.