A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

(Δωριεύς), the son of Diagoras [DIAGORAS], one of the noblest of the noble Heracleid family, the Eratids of Ialysus, in Rhodes. He was victor in the pancratium in three successive Olympiads, the 87th, 88th, and 89th, B. C. 432, 428 and 424, the second of which is mentioned by Thucydides (3.8); at the Nemean games he won seven, at the Isthmian eight victories. He and his kinsman, Peisidorus, were styled in the announcement as Thurians, so that, apparently, before 424 at latest, they had left their country. (Paus. 6.7.) The whole family were outlawed as heads of the aristocracy by the Athenians (Xen. Hell. 1.5.19), and took refuge in Thurii; and from Thurii, after the Athenian disaster at Syracuse had re-established there the Peloponnesian interest, Dorieus led thirty galleys to the aid of the Spartan cause in Greece. He arrived with them at Cnidus in the winter of 412. (Thuc. 8.35.) He was, no doubt, active in the revolution which, in the course of the same winter, was effected at Rhodes (Thuc. 8.44); its revolt from the Athenians was of course accompanied by the restoration of the family of Diagoras. (B. C. 411.) We find him early in the summer at. Miletus, joining in the expostulations of his men to Astyochus, who, in the Spartan fashion, raised his staff as if to strike him, and by this act so violently excited the Thurian sailors that he was saved from violence only by flying to an altar. (Thuc. 8.84.) And shortly after, when the new commander, Mindarus, sailed for the Hellespont, he was sent with thirteen ships to crush a democratical movement in Rhodes. (Diod. 13.38.) Some little time after the battle of Cynossema he entered the Hellespont with his squadron, now fourteen in number, to join the main body; and being descried and attacked by the Athenians with twenty, was forced to run his vessels ashore, near Rhoeteum. Here he vigorously maintained himself until Mindarus came to his succour, and, by the advance of the rest of the Athenian fleet, the action became general: it was decided by the sudden arrival of Alcibiades with reinforcements. (Xen. Hell. 1.1.2; Diod. 13.45.) Four years after, at the close of B. C. 407, he was captured, with two Thurian galleys, by the Athenians, and sent, no doubt, to Athens: but the people, in admiration of his athletic size and noble beauty, dismissed their ancient enemy, though already under sentence of death, without so-much as exacting a ransom. (Xen. Hell. 1.5.19.) Pausanias, (l.c.,) on the authority of Androtion, further relates, that at the time when Rhodes joined the Athenian league formed by Conon, Dorieus chanced to be somewhere in the reach of the Spartans, and was by them seized and put to death.

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