Andokides (Admiral)

Andokides , son of Leogoras, was a politician and admiral of the city of Athens at the time of Pericles (* around 490 BC; † before 429 BC) .

It came from the old Kerykes family, which belonged to the Eupatrids and , as Plutarch reports, traced their family tree back to Odysseus and derived its origin from the god Hermes .

Andokides was the father of a son named Leogoras and the grandfather of the famous Greek orator Andokides , who lived in 415 BC. Was involved in the so-called Hermenfrevel and had to go into exile as a result of the events. The above-mentioned son Leogoras was also threatened by this affair and - like many other Athenians - almost lost his life in it.

As a nobleman, Andokides joined the oligarchic party in Athens. According to his grandson, the speaker Andokides, in his speech on peace with the Lacedaemonians , Andokides the Elder was. Ä. together with nine other politicians (including Kallias and Chares) a member of an Athenian delegation that negotiated a 30-year peace with the Spartans in the third year of the 83rd Olympiad (445 BC) .

As the Greek historian Thucydides mentions, Andokides received the influence of his party in 433 BC. Together with Glaukon , the son of Leagros, command of a fleet of twenty Athenian sailing ships, which were intended to come to the aid of the inhabitants of the island of Kerkyra , who were attacked by the Corinthians at sea and defeated in the sea battle at Sybota had been. The city of Athens maintained a defensive alliance with Corinth at this time and was also an ally of the island of Kerkyra. The aim of sending the fleet was to strengthen the back of the Kerkyrans, but to avoid breaking the alliance with Corinth if possible. The two admirals succeeded in doing this with their sea power, as their presence stabilized the situation around Kerkyra again. Since the victorious Corinthians did not dare to take up a fight with the fresh reinforcements from Athens after the losses in the sea battle at Sybota, their mere presence forced them to retreat without being able to reap the political harvest of their naval victory. They sailed again without any armed conflict between the Athenian and Corinthian armed forces.

Since the so-called speech against Alkibiades , which was previously ascribed to the grandson of Andokides, the speaker of the same name, has to be assigned to the Athenian politician Phaiax (or a scribe who writes in the name of Phaiax) with good reason, the speeches made in this speech can be assigned Information about embassies to Thessaly , Macedonia , Molossia, Thesprotia , Italy and Sicily neither refer to Admiral Andokides nor his grandson, the speaker Andokides, but must refer to the then politician Phaiax, a competitor of Alcibiades .

One must assume that Andokides d. Ä. a few years before 415 BC BC (possibly as early as 430 BC when his grandson was still a boy), because the speaker Andokides no longer mentions him on the occasion of his presentation of the events surrounding the so-called Hermenfrevel, which inevitably should have been the case if he would have lived or been politically active shortly before those events.

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• Plutarch: Life of the Ten Speakers , chap. Andokides .
• Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War . (Chapter I, 51)