So completely were the Torônæans surprised and thunderstruck, that hardly any attempt was made to resist. Even the fifty Athenian hoplites who occupied the agora, being found still asleep, were partly slain, and partly compelled to seek refuge in the separately-garrisoned cape of Lêkythus, whither they were followed by a portion of the Torônæan population; some from attachment to Athens, others from sheer terror. To these fugitives Brasidas addressed a proclamation, inviting them to return, and promising them perfect security, for person, property, and political rights; while at the same time he sent a herald with a formal summons to the Athenians in Lêkythus, requiring them to quit the place as belonging to the Chalkidians, but permitting them to carry away their property. They refused to evacuate the place, but solicited a truce of one day for the purpose of burying their slain. Brasidas granted them two days, which were employed both by them and by him in preparations for the defence and attack of Lêkythus; each party fortifying the houses on or near the connecting isthmus.
In the mean time he convened a general assembly of the Torônæan population, whom he addressed in the same conciliating and equitable language as he had employed elsewhere. “He had not come to harm either the city, or any individual citizen. Those who had let him in, ought not to be regarded as bad men or traitors, for they had acted with a view to the benefit and the liberation of their city, not in order to enslave it, or to acquire profit for themselves. On the other hand, he did not think the worse of those who had gone over to Lêkythus, for their liking towards Athens: he wished them to come back freely; and he was sure that the more they knew the Lacedæmonians the better they would esteem them. He was prepared to forgive and forget previous hostility, but while he invited all of them to live for the future as cordial friends and fellow-citizens, he should also for the future hold each man responsible for his conduct, either as friend or as enemy.”
On the expiration of the two days’ truce, Brasidas attacked the Athenian garrison in Lêkythus, promising a recompense of thirty minæ to the soldier who should first force his way into it. Notwithstanding very poor means of defence, partly a wooden palisade, partly houses with battlements on the roof, this garrison repelled him for one whole day: on the next morning he brought up a machine, for the same purpose as that which the Bœotians had employed at Delium, to set fire to the woodwork. The Athenians on their side, seeing this fire-machine approaching, put up, on a building in front of their position, a wooden scaffolding, upon which many of them mounted, with casks of water and large stones to break it or to extinguish the flames. At last, the weight accumulated becoming greater than the scaffolding could support, it broke down with a prodigious noise; so that all the persons and things upon it rolled down in confusion. Some of these men were hurt, yet the injury was not in reality serious; had not the noise, the cries, and strangeness of the incident alarmed those behind, who could not see precisely what had occurred, to such a degree, that they believed the enemy to have already forced the defences. Many of them accordingly took to flight, and those who remained were insufficient to prolong the resistance successfully; so that Brasidas, perceiving the disorder and diminished number of the defenders, relinquished his fire-machine, and again renewed his attempt to carry the place by assault, which now fully succeeded. A considerable proportion of the Athenians and others in the fort escaped across the narrow gulf to the peninsula of Pallênê, by means of the two triremes and some merchant-vessels at hand: but every man found in it was put to death. Brasidas, thus master of the fort, and considering that he owed his success to the sudden rupture of the Athenian scaffolding, regarded this incident as a divine interposition, and presented the thirty minæ, which he had promised as a reward to the first man who broke in, to the goddess Athênê, for her temple at Lêkythus. He moreover consecrated to her the entire cape of Lêkythus; not only demolishing the defences, but also dismantling the private residences which it contained,[680] so that nothing remained except the temple, with its ministers and appurtenances.
What proportion of the Torônæans who had taken refuge at Lêkythus had been induced to return by the proclamation of Brasidas, alike generous and politic, we are not informed. His language and conduct were admirably calculated to set this little community again in harmonious movement, and to obliterate the memory of past feuds. And above all, it inspired a strong sentiment of attachment and gratitude towards himself personally; a sentiment which gained strength with every successive incident in which he was engaged, and which enabled him to exercise a greater ascendency than could ever be acquired by Sparta, and in some respects greater than had ever been possessed by Athens. It is this remarkable development of commanding individuality, animated throughout by straightforward public purposes, and binding together so many little communities who had few other feelings in common, which lends to the short career of this eminent man a romantic and even an heroic interest.
During the remainder of the winter Brasidas employed himself in setting in order the acquisitions already made, and in laying plans for farther conquests in the spring.[681] But the beginning of spring—or the close of the eighth year, and beginning of the ninth year of the war, as Thucydidês reckons—brought with it a new train of events, which will be recounted in the following chapter.
CHAPTER LIV.
TRUCE FOR ONE YEAR.—RENEWAL OF WAR AND BATTLE OF AMPHIPOLIS.—PEACE OF NIKIAS.
The eighth year of the war, described in the last chapter, had opened with sanguine hopes for Athens, and with dark promise for Sparta, chiefly in consequence of the memorable capture of Sphakteria towards the end of the preceding summer. It included, not to mention other events, two considerable and important enterprises on the part of Athens, against Megara and against Bœotia; the former plan, partially successful, the latter, not merely unsuccessful, but attended with a ruinous defeat. Lastly, the losses in Thrace, following close upon the defeat at Delium, together with the unbounded expectations everywhere entertained from the future career of Brasidas, had again seriously lowered the impression entertained of Athenian power. The year thus closed amidst humiliations the more painful to Athens, as contrasted with the glowing hopes with which it had begun.
It was now that Athens felt the full value of those prisoners whom she had taken at Sphakteria. With those prisoners, as Kleon and his supporters had said truly, she might be sure of making peace whenever she desired it.[682] Having such a certainty to fall back upon, she had played a bold game, and aimed at larger acquisitions during the past year; and this speculation, though not in itself unreasonable, had failed: moreover, a new phenomenon, alike unexpected by all, had occurred, when Brasidas broke open and cut up her empire in Thrace. Still, so great was the anxiety of the Spartans to regain their captives, who had powerful friends and relatives at home, that they considered the victories of Brasidas chiefly as a stepping-stone towards that object, and as a means of prevailing upon Athens to make peace. To his animated representations sent home from Amphipolis, setting forth the prospects of still farther success and entreating reinforcements, they had returned a discouraging reply, dictated in no small degree by the miserable jealousy of some of their chief men;[683] who, feeling themselves cast into the shade, and looking upon his splendid career as an eccentric movement breaking loose from Spartan routine, were thus on personal as well as political grounds disposed to labor for peace. Such collateral motives, working upon the caution usual with Sparta, determined her to make use of the present fortune and realized conquests of Brasidas as a basis for negotiation and recovery of the prisoners; without opening the chance of ulterior enterprises, which though they might perhaps end in results yet more triumphant, would unavoidably put in risk that which was now secure.[684] The history of the Athenians during the past year might, indeed, serve as a warning to deter the Spartans from playing an adventurous game.
Ever since the capture of Sphakteria, the Lacedæmonians had been attempting, directly or indirectly, negotiations for peace and the recovery of the prisoners; their pacific dispositions being especially instigated by king Pleistoanax, whose peculiar circumstances gave him a strong motive to bring the war to a close. He had been banished from Sparta, fourteen years before the commencement of the war, and a little before the thirty years’ truce, under the charge of having taken bribes from the Athenians on occasion of invading Attica. For more than eighteen years, he lived in banishment, close to the temple of Zeus Lykæus, in Arcadia; in such constant fear of the Lacedæmonians, that his dwelling-house was half within the consecrated ground.[685] But he never lost the hope of procuring restoration, through the medium of the Pythian priestess at Delphi, whom he and his brother Aristoklês kept in their pay. To every sacred legation which went from Sparta to Delphi, she repeated the same imperative injunction: “They must bring back the seed of (Hêraklês) the demi-god son of Zeus, from foreign land to their own: if they did not, it would be their fate to plough with a silver ploughshare.” The command of the god, thus incessantly repeated and backed by the influence of those friends who supported Pleistoanax at home, at length produced an entire change of sentiment at Sparta. In the fourth or fifth year of the Peloponnesian war, the exile was recalled; and not merely recalled, but welcomed with unbounded honors, received with the same sacrifices and choric shows as those which were said to have been offered to the primitive kings, on the first settlement of Sparta.