92.
About the same time the Peloponnesians erected the colony of Heracleia in Trachinia with this intention.
The Melians in the whole contain these three parts:
[
2]
Paralians, Hierans, and Trachinians.
Of these the Trachinians, being afflicted with war from the Oetaeans their borderers, thought at first to have joined themselves to the Athenians;
but fearing that they would not be faithful to them, they sent to Lacedaemon, choosing for their ambassador Tisamenus.
[
3]
And the Dorians, who are the mother nation to the Lacedaemonians, sent their ambassadors likewise with him with the same requests;
for they also were infested with war from the same Oetaeans.
[
4]
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.
[5]
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.
[6]
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.
