The Thebans on the right thus pushed back[636] the troops on the left of the Athenian line, who retired at first slowly, and for a short space, maintaining their order unbroken, so that the victory of the Athenians on their own right would have restored the battle, had not Pagondas detached from the rear two squadrons of cavalry; who, wheeling unseen round the hill behind, suddenly appeared to the relief of the Bœotian left, and produced upon the Athenians on that side, already deranged in their ranks by the ardor of pursuit, the intimidating effect of a fresh army arriving to reinforce the Bœotians. And thus, even on the right, the victorious portion of their line, the Athenians lost courage and gave way; while on the left, where they were worsted from the beginning, they found themselves pressed harder and harder by the pursuing Thebans: so that in the end, the whole Athenian army was broken, dispersed, and fled. The garrison of Delium, reinforced by three hundred cavalry, whom Hippokratês had left there to assail the rear of the Bœotians during the action, either made no vigorous movement, or were repelled by a Bœotian reserve stationed to watch them. Flight having become general among the Athenians, the different parts of their army took different directions: the right sought refuge at Delium, the centre fled to Orôpus, and the left took a direction towards the high lands of Parnês. The pursuit of the Bœotians was vigorous and destructive: they had an efficient cavalry, strengthened by some Lokrian horse who had arrived even during the action: their peltasts also, and their light-armed, would render valuable service against retreating hoplites.[637] Fortunately for the vanquished, the battle had begun very late in the afternoon, leaving no long period of daylight: this important circumstance saved the Athenian army from almost total destruction.[638] As it was, however, the general Hippokratês, together with nearly one thousand hoplites, and a considerable number of light-armed and attendants, were slain; while the loss of the Bœotians, chiefly on their defeated left wing, was rather under five hundred hoplites. Some prisoners[639] seem to have been made, but we hear little about them. Those who had fled to Delium and Orôpus were conveyed back by sea to Athens.
The victors retired to Tanagra, after erecting their trophy, burying their own dead, and despoiling those of their enemies. An abundant booty of arms from the stripped warriors, long remained to decorate the temples of Thebes, and the spoil in other ways is said to have been considerable. Pagondas also resolved to lay siege to the newly-established fortress at Delium: but before commencing operations,—which might perhaps prove tedious, since the Athenians could always reinforce the garrison by sea,—he tried another means of attaining the same object. He despatched to the Athenians a herald, who, happening in his way to meet the Athenian herald, coming to ask the ordinary permission for burial of the slain, warned him that no such request would be entertained until the message of the Bœotian general had first been communicated, and thus induced him to come back to the Athenian commanders. The Bœotian herald was instructed to remonstrate against the violation of holy custom committed by the Athenians in seizing and fortifying the temple of Delium; wherein their garrison was now dwelling, performing numerous functions which religion forbade to be done in a sacred place, and using as their common drink the water especially consecrated to sacrificial purposes. The Bœotians therefore solemnly summoned them in the name of Apollo, and the gods inmates along with him, to evacuate the place, carrying away all that belonged to them: and the herald gave it to be understood, that, unless this summons were complied with, no permission would be granted to bury the dead.
Answer was returned by the Athenian herald, who now went to the Bœotian commanders, to the following effect: “The Athenians did not admit that they had hitherto been guilty of any wrong in reference to the temple, and protested that they would persist in respecting it for the future as much as possible. Their object in taking possession of it had been no evil sentiment towards the holy place, but the necessity of avenging the repeated invasions of Attica by the Bœotians. Possession of the territory, according to the received maxims of Greece, always carried along with it possession of temples therein situated, under obligation to fulfil all customary obligations to the resident god, as far as circumstances permitted. It was upon this maxim that the Bœotians had themselves acted when they took possession of their present territory, expelling the prior occupants and appropriating the temples: it was upon the same maxim that the Athenians would act in retaining so much of Bœotia as they had now conquered, and in conquering more of it, if they could. Necessity compelled them to use the consecrated water—a necessity not originating in the ambition of Athens, but in prior Bœotian aggressions upon Attica,—a necessity which they trusted that the gods would pardon, since their altars were allowed as a protection to the involuntary offender, and none but he who sinned without constraint experienced their displeasure. The Bœotians were guilty of far greater impiety in refusing to give back the dead, except upon certain conditions connected with the holy ground, than the Athenians, who merely refused to turn the duty of sepulture into an unseemly bargain. Tell us unconditionally (concluded the Athenian herald) that we may bury our dead under truce, pursuant to the maxims of our forefathers. Do not tell us that we may do so on condition of going out of Bœotia, for we are no longer in Bœotia; we are in our own territory, won by the sword.”
The Bœotian generals dismissed the herald with a reply short and decisive: “If you are in Bœotia, you may take away all that belongs to you, but only on condition of going out of it. If on the other hand you are in your own territory, you can take your own resolution without asking us.”[640]
In this debate, curious as an illustration of Grecian manners and feelings, there seems to have been special pleading and evasion on both sides. The final sentence of the Bœotians was good as a reply to the incidental argument raised by the Athenian herald, who had rested the defence of Athens in regard to the temple of Delium on the allegation that the territory was Athenian, not Bœotian, Athenian by conquest and by the right of the strongest, and had concluded by affirming the same thing about Oropia, the district to which the battle-field belonged. It was only this same argument, of actual superior force, which the Bœotians retorted, when they said: “If the territory to which your application refers is yours by right of conquest (i. e. if you are de facto masters of it, and are strongest within it), you can of course do what you think best in it: you need not ask any truce at our hands; you can bury your dead without a truce.”[641] The Bœotians knew that at this moment the field of battle was under guard by a detachment of their army,[642] and that the Athenians could not obtain the dead bodies without permission; but since the Athenian herald had asserted the reverse as a matter of fact, we can hardly wonder that they resented the production of such an argument; meeting it by a reply sufficiently pertinent in mere diplomatic fencing.
But if the Athenian herald, instead of raising the incidental point of territorial property, combined with an incautious definition of that which constituted territorial property, as a defence against the alleged desecration of the temple of Delium, had confined himself to the main issue, he would have put the Bœotians completely in the wrong. According to principles universally respected in Greece, the victor, if solicited, was held bound to grant to the vanquished a truce for burying his dead; to grant and permit it absolutely, without annexing any conditions. On this, the main point in debate, the Bœotians sinned against the most sacred international law of Greece, when they exacted the evacuation of the temple at Delium as a condition for consenting to permit the burial of the Athenian dead. Ultimately, after they had taken Delium, we shall find that they did grant it unconditionally; and we may doubt whether they would have ever persisted in refusing it, if the Athenian herald had pressed this one important principle separately and exclusively; and if he had not, by an unskilful plea in vindication of the right to occupy and live at Delium, both exasperated their feelings, and furnished them with a collateral issue as a means of evading the main demand.[643]
To judge this curious debate with perfect impartiality, we ought to add, in reference to the conduct of the Athenians in occupying Delium, that for an enemy to make special choice of a temple, as a post to be fortified and occupied, was a proceeding certainly rare, perhaps hardly admissible, in Grecian warfare. Nor does the vindication offered by the Athenian herald meet the real charge preferred. It is one thing for an enemy of superior force to overrun a country, and to appropriate everything within it, sacred as well as profane: it is another thing for a border enemy, not yet in sufficient force for conquering the whole, to convert a temple of convenient site into a regular garrisoned fortress, and make it a base of operations against the neighboring population. On this ground, the Bœotians might reasonably complain of the seizure of Delium: though I apprehend that no impartial interpreter of Grecian international custom would have thought them warranted in attaching it as a condition to their grant of the burial-truce when solicited.
All negotiation being thus broken off, the Bœotian generals prepared to lay siege to Delium, aided by two thousand Corinthian hoplites, together with some Megarians and the late Peloponnesian garrison of Nisæa, who joined after the news of the battle. Though they sent for darters and slingers, probably Œtæans and Ætolians, from the Maliac gulf, yet their direct attacks were at first all repelled by the garrison, aided by an Athenian squadron off the coast, in spite of the hasty and awkward defences by which alone the fort was protected. At length they contrived a singular piece of fire-mechanism, which enabled them to master the place. They first sawed in twain a thick beam, pierced a channel through it long-ways from end to end, coated most part of the channel with iron, and then joined the two halves accurately together. From the farther end of this hollowed beam they suspended by chains a boiler, full of pitch, brimstone, and burning charcoal; lastly, an iron tube projected from the end of the interior channel of the beam, in a direction so as to come near to the boiler. Such was the machine, which, constructed at some distance, was brought on carts and placed close to the wall, near the palisading and the wooden towers. The Bœotians then applied great bellows to their own end of the beam, blowing violently with a close current of air through the interior channel, so as to raise an intense fire in the boiler at the other end. The wooden portions of the wall, soon catching fire, became untenable for the defenders, who escaped in the best way they could, without attempting farther resistance. Two hundred of them were made prisoners and a few slain; but the greater number got safely on shipboard. This recapture of Delium took place on the seventeenth day after the battle, during all which interval the Athenians slain had remained on the field unburied. Presently, however, arrived the Athenian herald to make fresh application for the burial-truce; which was now forthwith granted, and granted unconditionally.[644]
Such was the memorable expedition and battle of Delium, a fatal discouragement to the feeling of confidence and hope which had previously reigned at Athens, besides the painful immediate loss which it inflicted on the city. Among the hoplites who took part in the vigorous charge and pushing of shields, the philosopher Sokratês is to be numbered. His bravery both in the battle and the retreat was much extolled by his friends, and doubtless with good reason: he had before served with credit in the ranks of the hoplites at Potidæa, and he served also at Amphipolis: his patience under hardship and endurance of heat and cold being not less remarkable than his personal bravery. He and his friend Lachês were among those hoplites, who, in the retreat from Delium, instead of flinging away their arms and taking to flight, kept their ranks, their arms, and their firmness of countenance; insomuch that the pursuing cavalry found it dangerous to meddle with them, and turned to an easier prey in the disarmed fugitives. Alkibiadês also served at Delium in the cavalry, and helped to protect Sokratês in the retreat. The latter was thus exposing his life at Delium nearly at the same time when Aristophanês was exposing him to derision in the comedy of the Clouds, as a dreamer alike morally worthless and physically incapable.[645]
Severe as the blow was which the Athenians suffered at Delium, their disasters in Thrace about the same time, or towards the close of the same summer and autumn, were yet more calamitous. I have already mentioned the circumstances which led to the preparation of a Lacedæmonian force intended to act against the Athenians in Thrace, under Brasidas, in concert with the Chalkidians, revolted subjects of Athens, and with Perdikkas of Macedon. Having frustrated the Athenian designs against Megara (as described above),[646] Brasidas completed the levy of his division,—seventeen hundred hoplites, partly Helots, partly Dorian Peloponnesians,—and conducted them, towards the close of the summer, to the Lacedæmonian colony of Herakleia, in the Trachinian territory near the Maliac gulf. To reach Macedonia and Thrace, it was necessary for him to pass through Thessaly, which was no easy task; for the war had now lasted so long that every state in Greece had become mistrustful of the transit of armed foreigners. Moreover, the mass of the Thessalian population were decidedly friendly to Athens, nor had he any sufficient means to force a passage: while, should he wait to apply for formal permission, there was much doubt whether it would be granted, and perfect certainty of such delay and publicity as would put the Athenians on their guard. But though such was the temper of the Thessalian people, yet the Thessalian governments, all oligarchical, sympathized with Lacedæmon; and the federal authority or power of the tagus, which bound together the separate cities, was generally very weak. What was of still greater importance, the Macedonian Perdikkas, as well as the Chalkidians, had in every city powerful guests and partisans, whom they prevailed upon to exert themselves actively in forwarding the passage of the army.[647]