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A second trireme was launched with all speed, and the Mytilenaeans present in Athens promised large rewards to the crew if they arrived in time. With such inducements the rowers toiled day and night, taking their meals, which consisted of barley-meal kneaded with wine and oil, at the oar, and sleeping and rowing by turns.
After a dignified remonstrance against the vile insinuations of Cleon, by whom all who differed from him were decried as fools or knaves, Diodotus proceeded to argue the question from the point of view of expediency. He was not there, he said, to plead the cause of the Mytilenaeans, or to discuss abstract questions of law and justice.
If the Mytilenaeans erected a statue to him as their deliverer and founder, as the man who had as well by land as by sea terminated the wars with which the world was filled, such a homage might not seem too extravagant for the vanquisher of the pirates and of the empires of the east. But the Romans this time surpassed the Greeks.
This, he said, would be the effect on the subjects of Athens, if they passed the same sentence on the Mytilenaeans, without distinction between the innocent and the guilty.
On the mainland of Asia Minor Seleucus had in the meanwhile begun the siege of Pergamus, while Antiochus with his chief army ravaged the Pergamene territory and the possessions of the Mytilenaeans on the mainland; they hoped to crush the hated Attalids, before Roman aid appeared.
Shortly afterwards the Athenian fleet hove in sight. As the Mytilenaeans refused to obey the summons delivered to them in the name of the imperial people, that they should raze their walls, and surrender their ships, hostilities commenced.
He sailed to Asia, and took up his residence at Sigeum in the Troad, which his father had wrested from the Mytilenaeans in war. Hippias was expelled in B.C. 510, four years after the assassination of Hipparchus. These four years had been a time of suffering and oppression for the Athenians, and had effaced from their minds all recollection of the former mild rule of Pisistratus and his sons.
The summer was now drawing to a close, and as yet no progress had been made with the siege of Mytilene. The town was still blockaded by sea, but the Mytilenaeans had free egress on the land-side, and marched up and down the island, confirming the other towns which had joined in the revolt, and threatening Methymna, which still remained loyal to the Athenian alliance.
If the Mytilenaeans erected a statue to him as their deliverer and founder, as the man who had as well by land as by sea terminated the wars with which the world was filled, such a homage might not seem too extravagant for the vanquisher of the pirates and of the empires of the east. But the Romans this time surpassed the Greeks.
But now was seen one of the weaknesses inherent in the nature of the Athenian constitution. These measures could not be taken without public debate in the popular assembly, and such a method of procedure rendered secrecy impossible. The Mytilenaeans received timely warning of their danger, and keeping close within their walls, repaired the weak places in their defences, and set a careful watch.
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