Lelantine War

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Lelantine War

a war on the island of Euboea between the cities of Chalcis and Eretria over control of the fertile Lelantine plain (Lelanton pedion) in the seventh century B.C. In this war, Samos, Corinth, and the cities of the Thracian coast sided with Chalcis, and Miletus and Megara with Eretria. The Lelantine War thus became a war between two alliances of commercial cities of ancient Greece. The war ended in a victory of Chalcis and its allies; the Thessalian cavalry played the decisive role in the victory.

References in classic literature ?

And there is nothing in the context to show that Hesiod's Amphidamas is to be identified with that Amphidamas whom Plutarch alone connects with the Lelantine War: the name may have been borne by an earlier Chalcidian, an ancestor, perhaps, of the person to whom Plutarch refers.

Critics from Plutarch downwards have almost unanimously rejected the lines 654-662, on the ground that Hesiod's Amphidamas is the hero of the Lelantine Wars between Chalcis and Eretria, whose death may be placed circa 705 B.C.

View in context

It can be a salutary exercise to demonstrate the lack of coherence of the ancient reports about, say, the Lelantine War, the First Sacred War, or the Spartan "Great Rhetra," but too much of this kind of historiographical overkill will make most students long to be somewhere else playing videogames.

A History of the Archaic Greek World ca. 1200-479 BCE

In the unlikely event that you were wondering why, in all this, the Lelantine War gets barely a couple of name-checks, you will be pleased to hear of Victor Parker's 189-page monograph (B)(**)Untersuchungen zum Lelantischen Krieg.(4) And I thought that Oswyn Murray had been generous when he devoted four pages to this war in a chapter in Early Greece (of which he has declared himself `especially proud', but of which P.