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But Andocides, since his reputation in public life was not good, took to merchandising and became a friend of the Cypriote kings and many other men of note, at which time he abducted a girl of Athenian birth, daughter of Aristeides and his own niece, without the knowledge of her family, and sent her as a gift to the King of Cyprus. Then, when he was to be brought to trial for this, he stole her back again from Cyprus and was caught and put in prison by the king; but he ran away and came back to Athens at the time when the Four Hundred were in control of affairs. He was put in prison by them, but escaped, and again, when the oligarchy was overthrown, he was banished from the city after the Thirty had taken over the government. He spent the period of his exile in Elis, but when Thrasybulus and his band returned,In the summer of 404 b.c. thirty men had been appointed to draw up laws and manage the state temporarily. Thrasybulus seized the hill-fortress of Phylê in December and maintained his position against two attacks by the Thirty. In May 403 Thrasybulus and his followers seized Peiraeus. In September the Thirty were overthrown and the democracy re-established. he also returned to the city. He was sent to Lacedaemon to negotiate a peace, but was suspected of wrongdoingThe nature of the accusation cannot be determined. See Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit, 2nd ed., pp. 293 ff. The oration On the Peace, delivered between 393 and 390 b.c., deals with the terms proposed by the mission in which Andocides participated. and banished. He gives information about all this in the speeches which he wrote; for some of them he composed in his defence in the matter of the mysteries, and others when he was asking to be allowed to return home. There is also extant his speech On the Indictment, also the Defence against Phaeax and the speech On the Peace. He flourished at the same time as Socrates the philosopher; the date of his birth was the seventy-eighth Olympiad, when Theogenides was archon468-467 b.c. This date, however, is based upon a false reckoning, and from the orator’s own statements he could not have been born much before 440. See Blass, ibid. i. p. 283, and Kirchner, Prosop. Att. 828. at Athens, so that he was about ten years olderThe numeral is an emendation. than Lysias. The Hermes called the Hermes of Andocides is named after him. It is a dedication of the tribe Aegeis and is called Hermes of Andocides because Andocides lived near it. He himself supplied the chorus for his tribeA decree of the tribe Pandionis in which the orator is named among the victorious choregi is extant, I. G. ii. 1138 (ed. min.); it was with a chorus of boys at the Dionysia. when it was competing in a dithyrambic contest, and he gained the victory, for which he set up a tripod on a high spot opposite the limestone Silenus. He is simple and free from artifice in his orations, plain and employing no figures of speech.
