Enfoldeth now.
Yet, dead, they die not. Glory’s herald
Descends the dome
And from the halls of Death, triumphant,
Now leads them home.”
When Platæa next appears in a great passage of literature she is shorn of her glory, the helpless prey of a foreign enemy and a hostile neighbour. During the Peloponnesian War, in 431 B. C., the Spartans conquered the city and, to please the Thebans, razed it to the ground. Thucydides’s account of the tragic occurrence includes the speeches made to the Spartans by the Platæans, who prayed for their lives, and by the Thebans, who urged their murder. That no speeches in Thucydides are more dramatic has been generally conceded from the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. They have made it bitter even now to remember that the selfish opportunism and merciless rancour of the Thebans prevailed against the memories of “the great days of old,” invoked by the Platæans: “Look yonder to the sepulchres of your fathers slain by the Medes and buried in this land. Them we have honoured year by year with public offerings of raiment and such other things as usage calls for.... Pausanias gave them burial here because he felt that he was placing them with friends and in a friendly land. But you, if you shall slay us and shall make Platæa Theban land, what do you else in this than leave your fathers and your kinsmen, bereft of honours that are theirs, among murderers and in a hostile land? Nay more, you will actually enslave a country in which the Hellenes won their liberty and bring to desolation sanctuaries of the gods in which they prayed before they gained mastery over the Medes.”
The desolation fell. Later the little town was rebuilt, destroyed once more, and finally restored, though somewhat meanly, in the time of Alexander. Now not even a modern village brings life to the ancient site. Only ruins of the Alexandrian walls remain.
Bœotia had several important religious centres outside of Thebes. More penetrating than the trumpet of war were the voices that called the Greeks of north and south, and even the barbarians of the east, to the sanctuary of oracular Apollo on the slopes of Mount Ptoön, or to the oracle of Trophonius (a local deity probably to be identified with Zeus) at Lebadeia, which is beautifully situated on the western side of the Copaic plain looking toward Helicon and Parnassus. The Ptoön precinct was already abandoned in Plutarch’s time, and even more deserted than it is to-day when archæologists outnumber the occasional shepherds in search of mountain pasture. But the oracle of Lebadeia retained its sanctity into Roman times and was consulted by both Plutarch and Pausanias. In our day the same river in which the suppliants used to bathe, in preparation for the difficult sacred rites, turns the mills and factories of one of the busiest industrial centres of northern Greece.
Religion in Bœotia, as everywhere in Greece, furnished an artistic impulse. Contests of poetry and music were held at almost every centre. Architecture, sculpture, and painting were represented by the most famous masters. A temple renowned for its beauty was that of the Graces at Orchomenus. Within it, on a happy day in the fifth century, a chorus of boys lustily sang an ode written by Pindar for one of their fellows who had won a foot-race in Pisa’s famous valley. The young champion had doubtless illustrated the influence of his native divinities whom the poet celebrates:—
“O ye who have your dwelling in the land of goodly steeds that shares the waters of Cephisus, Queens of radiant Orchomenus, O Graces famed in song, ye Guardians of the Minyans in ages gone, give ear! To you I pray! For by your gift come all things sweet and pleasant unto man—his wisdom, beauty, and the sheen of victory. Nay, not the gods themselves can lord it over dance or festival without the Graces pure, for as comptrollers of all heaven’s deeds they have their thrones beside Apollo, Python-slayer with the golden bow, and reverence th’ Olympian Father’s majesty eterne.”