Alcidas

Family: Peloponnesian · Role: high admiral · First appears: Book 3 · Chapter 9 · Part 4

Afterwards, the Lacedaemonians appointed Alcidas high admiral of a fleet sent to Lesbos. The next summer he led the fleet toward Mitylene, but about seven days after the town’s capture, he learned at Embatu that the expedition had failed. He rejected Teutiaplus’s advice to attack Mitylene by surprise, butchered most of the prisoners taken on the voyage at Myonnesus, and later released the Chian prisoners and some others at Ephesus. Paches pursued him as far as Patmos but turned back when Alcidas was too far ahead to catch.

After the failed expedition, Brasidas, son of Tellis, arrived as Alcidas’s counsellor, and the two prepared to sail to Corcyra with a strengthened fleet. At Sybota, Brasidas urged his superior officer to attack Corcyra, but the Peloponnesians refrained. About this time, Alcidas was named with Leon, founder of Heraclea and Damagon among the Lacedaemonian founders of Heraclea, where the settlement was fortified; harsh and sometimes unfair rule by the Lacedaemonian governors drove away most inhabitants and weakened the colony.