1But because of the winter season these plans went forward less successfully. 1He hears that certain Pisidians are preparing forces against him. 1He sends his son Arsidaeus there with an army; 1the young man falls in battle. 1The father sets out there with no very large force, concealing how great a wound he had received, because he wished to reach the enemy before the report of the defeat reached his men, so that the soldiers' spirits should not be weakened by learning of his son's death. 2He arrived where he had been hurrying and pitched camp in such a place that he could neither be surrounded by the multitude of his opponents nor prevented from having his own force ready for battle.
3With him was Mithrobarzanes, his father-in-law, commander of the cavalry. 3He, despairing of his son-in-law's fortunes, deserted to the enemy. 3When Datames heard this, he realised that if it got out among the crowd that he had been abandoned by a man so closely connected with him, the rest would follow the same course; 4so he gives out publicly that Mithrobarzanes had gone on his orders as a pretended deserter, so that, once received, he might more easily slaughter the enemy: therefore it was not right that he should be abandoned, and all should follow at once. 4If they did this with vigorous spirit, the enemy would be unable to resist, since they would be cut down both inside their rampart and outside it.
5This being approved, he leads out the army and pursues Mithrobarzanes, who had only just reached the enemy when Datames orders the standards to advance. 6The Pisidians, disturbed by this strange turn, are led to believe that the deserters had acted in bad faith and by arrangement, so that once received they might bring the greater disaster. 6They attack them first. 6These men, since they did not know what was going on or why it was happening, were forced to fight against those to whom they had gone over and to stand with those whom they had left: and as neither side spared them, they were quickly cut to pieces.
7Datames attacks the rest of the Pisidians as they resist: he drives them back at the first charge, pursues them as they flee, kills many, and takes the enemy's camp. 8By such a plan he at one and the same time struck down the traitors and routed the enemy, and turned what had been designed for his ruin into his salvation. 8We have read nowhere of any general's plan more shrewdly conceived or more swiftly carried out than this.