Diodorus (xv, 47) makes a statement quite different from Xenophon. He says that Timotheus was at first deposed from his command, but afterwards forgiven and re-appointed by the people (jointly with Iphikrates) in consequence of the great accession of force which he had procured in his preliminary cruise. Accordingly the fleet, one hundred and thirty triremes in number, was despatched to Korkyra under the joint command of Iphikrates and Timotheus. Diodorus makes no mention of the trial of Timotheus. This account is evidently quite distinct from that of Xenophon, which latter is on all grounds to be preferred, especially as its main points are in conformity with the Demosthenic oration. [327] Demosth. cont. Timoth. c. 6. p. 1191; c. 8. p. 1194. We see from another passage of the same oration, that the creditors of Timotheus reckoned upon his making a large sum of money in the Persian service (c. 1, p. 1185). This farther illustrates what I have said in a previous note, about the motives of the distinguished Athenian officers to take service in foreign parts away from Athens. That admiral, whose naval force had been reinforced by a large number of Korkyræan triremes, was committing without opposition incursions against Akarnania, and the western coast of Peloponnesus; insomuch that the expelled Messenians, in their distant exile at Hesperides in Libya, began to conceive hopes of being restored by Athens to Naupaktus, which they had occupied under her protection during the Peloponnesian war.[328] And while the Athenians were thus masters at sea both east and west of Peloponnesus,[329] Sparta and her confederates, discouraged by the ruinous failure of their expedition against Korkyra in the preceding year, appear to have remained inactive. With such mental predispositions, they were powerfully affected by religious alarm arising from certain frightful earthquakes and inundations with which Peloponnesus was visited during this year, and which were regarded as marks of the wrath of the god Poseidon. More of these formidable visitations occurred this year in Peloponnesus than had ever before been known; especially one, the worst of all, whereby the two towns of Helikê and Bura in Achaia were destroyed, together with a large portion of their population. Ten Lacedæmonian triremes, which happened to be moored on this shore on the night when the calamity occurred, were destroyed by the rush of the waters.[330] [328] Xen. Hellen. vi, 2, 38; Pausanias, iv, 26, 3. [329] See a curious testimony to this fact in Demosthen. cont. Neæram, c. 12, p. 1357. [330] Diodor. xi, 48, 49; Pausan. vii, 25; Ælian. Hist. Animal. xi, 19. Kallisthenes seems to have described at large, with appropriate religious comments, numerous physical portents which occurred about this time (see Kallisthen. Fragm. 8, ed. Didot).