Description of Greece

​At that time Lysimachus fought first among the neighboring peoples with the Odrysae, and secondly he marched against Dromichaetes and the Getae. Having encountered men who were not inexperienced in war and far surpassed them in number, he himself escaped after reaching the extreme of danger, but his son Agathocles, who was campaigning with him, was then for the first time captured by the Getae. Lysimachus, having met with setbacks in battles even later and not treating the capture of his son as a secondary matter, concluded peace with Dromichaetes, giving up to the Getan the parts of his own dominion beyond the Ister and marrying his daughter to him, largely out of necessity. But some say that not Agathocles but Lysimachus himself was captured, and was saved by Agathocles negotiating with the Getan on his behalf. When he returned, he married Lysandra to Agathocles, who was the daughter of Ptolemy the son of Lagus and Eurydice.

​He also crossed with ships to Asia and helped to overthrow the rule of Antigonus. He also founded the present city of the Ephesians as far as the sea by bringing into it Lebedians and Colophonians as inhabitants, after destroying their cities, so that Phoenix, the iambic poet of the Colophonians, lamented its capture. Hermesianax, the writer of elegiacs, does not seem to me to have still been alive; for surely he too would have lamented for captured Colophon. Lysimachus also entered into a war against Pyrrhus, the son of Aeacides; having watched for his departure from Epirus, as indeed he often wandered, he plundered the rest of Epirus and went to the tombs of the kings.

​But the events from this point are not credible to me; Hieronymus of Cardia wrote that Lysimachus, having destroyed the tombs of the dead, cast out the bones. This Hieronymus indeed has a reputation in other respects for writing with hostility toward the kings except Antigonus, and for favoring him unjustly; but concerning the tombs of the Epiriotes, he is completely obvious in having composed it out of spite, that a Macedonian man would destroy the tombs of the dead. Moreover, Lysimachus surely knew that these were the ancestors not only of Pyrrhus but also of Alexander; for Alexander was both an Epiriote and of the Aeacidae on his mother’s side, and the subsequent alliance of Pyrrhus with Lysimachus shows that, even though they fought, nothing irreconcilable arose between them. Perhaps Hieronymus had other charges against Lysimachus, but the greatest was that he destroyed the city of the Cardians and founded Lysimacheia in its place on the isthmus of the Thracian Chersonese.