“While I held my breath in terror lest anything in my plan should go wrong, I yet noticed with pride the spirit of our men who shouted their battle-cries, and shot streams of arrows in return for those sent over by the enemy foot-soldiers. Nearer and nearer came the monster—my heart stood still—and then, just as I was feeling I must faint or scream, with such a crash as to make the whole city totter, it suddenly disappeared into the ground. Almost disappeared, for only the topmost and smallest storey was visible!
“At first it seemed as though the whole world had been suddenly struck dumb. Not a sound was heard from either side, besiegers or besieged. Then, after that moment of deathly silence a cry went up from the city that was like nothing I ever heard. The next moment I felt the arms of Chares catching me before I fell to the ground.
“The excitement and suspense had been too much for me, and when I opened my eyes I was lying in our barracks, and Phrynis, Chares, and crowds of other people, were waiting to embrace me, and call me the saviour of our city.
“For the war had ended while I was unconscious. Phrynis afterwards told me that messengers from many parts of Greece had for some days past arrived at the camp of Demetrius, urging him to make peace with us on our own terms. But he added: ‘It was the failure of his last and greatest engine rather than the entreaties of his friends that decided him to struggle no more for victory. The victory is ours, and we owe it to you, Cleon, a child in years, but a man in genius.’
“Such praise as this might well have filled me with foolish pride and vanity if I had not been quite sure that somehow or other I had been helped. I had not thought out the plan at all. It had come ready-made into my mind. But when I tried to explain this to Phrynis, he merely laughed at what he called my modesty, and I could see he did not understand. It was only Chares who understood, and made me understand also. But that came much later on, as I presently will tell you.
“Meanwhile everyone was mad with joy that the siege which had lasted a whole year, and was the most wonderful and celebrated that had ever happened, was over. Trumpets blew, bells rang, the city adorned with flowers and crowded with rejoicing people gave itself up to festivity.
“But in all this triumph I had no share, for I was too ill and unhappy to take any part in the victory rejoicings. Not only had excitement, lack of food, and the long strain of the war injured my health but sad news soon came to me from Athens, where my mother and sister were living.
“Chares had taken me to live with him at his house in Lindus, a town in the island not far from Rhodes, and there I heard that my mother was dead. She was ill when tidings of my father’s death reached her, and from the shock and grief of this news she never recovered. So the war had robbed me of both my parents and separated me from my sister, to whom some friend in Athens had offered a home.
“You may imagine that I was a very unhappy little boy in those first days of victory, and it was not for a long time that I could bring myself to take joy in the great work that lay before my friend, Chares.
“Almost as soon as the fighting ceased, he began the statue promised to the god, Phœbus Apollo—that statue which became one of the Seven Wonders of the World.