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Updated: May 26, 2025
"That Polykrates of Samos, whose name we heard so often in Egypt, has the best physician that Greece has ever produced. While I was lying here ill, Oroetes wrote to this Democedes, making him immense promises, if he would only come to Sardis directly. The Sainian pirates, who infest the whole Ionian coast, took the messenger captive and brought Oroetes' letter to their master Polykrates.
This approximate determination of the size of the earth tended to depose her from her dominating position, and gave rise to very serious theological results. In this the ancient investigations of Aristarchus of Samos, one of the Alexandrian school, 280 B.C., powerfully aided.
They sent an expedition to Samos, and besieged the city forty days, but were forced to retire without success. Then the exiles, thus made homeless, became pirates. They attacked the weak but rich island of Siphnos, which they ravaged, and forced the inhabitants to buy them off at a cost of one hundred talents.
Chaereas, however, managed to secrete himself as soon as he saw how things stood, and returning to Samos, drew a picture to the soldiers of the horrors enacting at Athens, in which everything was exaggerated; saying that all were punished with stripes, that no one could say a word against the holders of power, that the soldiers' wives and children were outraged, and that it was intended to seize and shut up the relatives of all in the army at Samos who were not of the government's way of thinking, to be put to death in case of their disobedience; besides a host of other injurious inventions.
For so the Athenians had marked them before with a Samaena, which is a sort of ship, low and flat in the prow, so as to look snub-nosed, but wide and large and well-spread in the hold, by which it both carries a large cargo and sails well. And it was so called, because the first of that kind was seen at Samos, having been built by order of Polycrates the tyrant.
We shall see that there are two other important centres; one out in Sicily, almost at the confines of the Greek territory in the west; the other in Asia Minor, notably on the island of Samos the island which, it will be recalled, was at an earlier day the birthplace of Pythagoras.
As he declined the offered naval battle, and as, owing to the small numbers of the Roman force, an attack by land was not to be thought of, nothing remained for the Roman fleet but to take up its position in like manner at Samos.
When Benjamin of Tudela left Constantinople, he visited Gallipoli and Kilia, a port on the Eastern coast, and went to the islands in the Archipelago, Mitylene, Chios, whence there was much trade in the juice of the pistachio-tree, Samos, Rhodes, and Cyprus.
Born in Asia Minor, probably in 484 B.C.; died in Italy, probably in 424; commonly called the "Father of History"; assisted in the expulsion of the tyrant Lygdamis from Halicarnassus; traveled in Persia, Egypt, and Greece; lived afterward in Samos and Athens, settling in Thurii, Italy, about 444 B.C.; his history of the Persian invasion of Greece, extending to 479 B.C., was first printed in Greek by Aldus Manutius in 1502, but a Latin version had appeared in 1474.
"Through the traders, who followed the fortunate Kolxus to the far west, and these pirate ships, Samos will become the richest of islands and Polykrates the most powerful of men, unless, as your father says, the gods become envious of such unchanging good fortune and prepare him a sudden and speedy downfall.
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