Four speeches ascribed to Andokides are extant, bearing the titles ‘On the Mysteries:’ ‘On his Return:’ ‘On the Peace with the Lacedaemonians:’ ‘Against Alkibiades.’ The speech On the Mysteries, as the chief extant work of its author, stands first in the manuscripts and the editions. But the second oration relates to an earlier passage in the life of Andokides, and may conveniently he considered first.

Speech On his Return

The speech of Andokides ‘On his Return’ affords no further internal evidence of its own date than that it was spoken later than 411 and earlier than 405 b.c. Blass places it in 409. But a circumstance which he has not noticed seems to us to make it almost certain that the speech cannot have been delivered later than the summer of 410. Andokides lays stress upon the service which he has rendered to Athens by securing a supply of corn from Cyprus. There had been a disappointment about this supply; but he states that he has overcome the difficulty,—that fourteen corn ships will be in the Peiraeus almost immediately, and that others are to follow. Now the event which had made this supply a matter of anxiety to Athens was the stoppage of the usual importations from the south coast of the Euxine. In 411 she had lost the command of the Bosphorus by the revolt of Chalkedon, and the command of the Hellespont by the revolt of Abydos. But, in 410, the battle of Kyzikos was followed by the reestablishment of Athenian power in the Propontis and in its adjacent straits.