Archidamus granted their request; but the answer brought from Athens put an end, as might have been expected, to the negotiation. It exhorted them to keep their faith with their ally, and to depend upon Athenian protection. Thus urged and emboldened, they resolved, whatever might befall them, to adhere to the side of Athens, and to break off all parley with the enemy, by a short answer, delivered not through envoys, but from the walls: that it was out of their power to do as the Spartans desired.[53] Archidamus, on receiving this declaration, prepared for attacking the city. But first, with great solemnity, he called upon the gods and heroes of the land to witness, that he had not invaded it without just cause, but after the Platæans had first abandoned their ancient confederates; and that whatever they might hereafter suffer would be a merited punishment of the perverseness with which they had rejected his equitable offers.
THE SPARTANS AND THEBANS ATTACK PLATÆA
His first operation, after ravaging the country, was to invest the city with a palisade, for which the fruit trees cut down by his troops furnished materials. This slight inclosure was sufficient for his purpose, as he hoped that the overwhelming superiority of his numbers would enable him to take the place by storm. The mode of attack which he chiefly relied upon, was the same which we have seen employed by the Persians against the Ionian cities. He attempted to raise a mound to a level with the walls. It was piled up with earth and rubbish, wood and stones, and was guarded on either side by a strong lattice-work of forest timber. For seventy days and seventy nights the troops, divided into parties which constantly relieved each other, were occupied in this labour without intermission, urged to their tasks by the Lacedæmonians who commanded the contingents of the allies. But as the mound rose, the besieged devised expedients for averting the danger.
First they surmounted the opposite part of their wall with a superstructure of brick—taken from the adjacent houses which were pulled down for the purpose—secured in a frame of timber, and shielded from fiery missiles by a curtain of raw hides and skins, which protected the workmen and their work. But as the mound still kept rising as fast as the wall, they set about contriving plans for reducing it. And first, issuing by night through an opening made in the wall, they scooped out and carried away large quantities of the earth from the lower part of the mound. But the Peloponnesians, on discovering this device, counteracted it, by repairing the breach with layers of stiff clay, pressed down close on wattles of reed. Thus baffled, the besieged sank a shaft within the walls, and thence working upon a rough estimate, dug a passage under ground as far as the mound, which they were thus enabled to undermine. And against this contrivance the enemy had no remedy, except in the multitude of hands, which repaired the loss almost as soon as it was felt.
But the garrison, fearing that they should not be able to struggle long with this disadvantage, and that their wall would at length be carried by force of numbers, provided against this event, by building a second wall, in the shape of a half-moon, behind the raised part of the old wall, which was the chord of the arc. Thus in the worst emergency they secured themselves a retreat, from which they would be able to assail the enemy to great advantage, and he would have to recommence his work under the most unfavourable circumstances. This countermure drove the besiegers to their last resources. They had already brought battering engines to play upon the walls. But the spirit and ingenuity of the besieged had generally baffled these assaults; though one had given an alarming shock to the superstructure in front of the half-moon. Sometimes the head of an engine was caught up by means of a noose; sometimes it was broken off by a heavy beam, suspended by chains from two levers placed on the wall.
Now, however, after the main hope of the Peloponnesians, which rested on their mound, was completely defeated by the countermure, Archidamus resolved to try a last extraordinary experiment. He caused the hollow between the mound and the wall, and all the space which he could reach on the other side, to be filled up with a pile of faggots, which, when it had been steeped in pitch and sulphur, was set on fire. The blaze was such as had perhaps never before been kindled by the art of man; Thucydides compares it to a burning forest. It penetrated to a great distance within the city; and if it had been seconded, as the besiegers hoped, by a favourable wind, would probably have destroyed it. The alarm and confusion which it caused for a time in the garrison were great; a large tract of the city was inaccessible. Yet it does not appear that Archidamus made any attempt to take advantage of their consternation and disorder. He waited; but the expected breeze did not come to spread the flames, and—according to a report which the historian mentions, but does not vouch for—a sudden storm of thunder and rain arose to quench them.
Thus thwarted and disheartened, and perhaps unable to keep the whole of his army any longer in the camp, he reluctantly determined to convert the siege to a blockade, which it was foreseen would be tedious and expensive. A part of the troops were immediately sent home: the remainder set about the work of circumvallation, which was apportioned to the contingents of the confederates. Two ditches were dug round the town, and yielded materials for a double line of walls, which were built in the intermediate space on the edge of each trench. The walls were sixteen feet asunder; but the interval was occupied with barracks for the soldiers, so that the whole might be said to form one wall. At the distance of ten battlements from each other were large towers, which covered the whole breadth of the rampart. At the autumnal equinox the lines were completed, and were left, one-half in the custody of the Bœotians, the other in that of their allies. The troops who were not needed for this service were then led back to their homes. The garrison of the place at this time consisted of four hundred Platæans, and eighty Athenians; and 110 women who had been retained, when all the useless hands were sent to Athens, to minister to the wants of the men.
PART OF THE PLATÆANS ESCAPE; THE REST CAPITULATE
Athens could do nothing for the relief of Platæa. The brave garrison had begun to suffer from the failure of provisions; and, as their condition grew hopeless, two of their leading men, Theænetus a soothsayer, and Eupompidas, one of the generals, conceived the project of escaping across the enemy’s lines. When it was first proposed, it was unanimously adopted: but as the time for its execution approached, half of the men shrank from the danger, and not more than 220 adhered to their resolution. The contrivers of the plan took the lead in the enterprise. Scaling ladders of a proper height were the first requisite; and they were made upon a measurement of the enemy’s wall, for which the besieged had no other basis than the number of layers of brick, which were sedulously counted over and over again by different persons, until the amount, and consequently the height of the wall, was sufficiently ascertained. A dark and stormy night, in the depth of winter, was chosen for the attempt; it was known that in such nights the sentinels took shelter in the towers, and left the intervening battlements unguarded; and it was on this practice that the success of the adventure mainly depended. It was concerted, that the part of the garrison which remained behind should make demonstrations of attacking the enemy’s lines on the side opposite to that by which their comrades attempted to escape. And first a small party, lightly armed, the right foot bare, to give them a surer footing in the mud, keeping at such a distance from each other as to prevent their arms from clashing, crossed the ditch, and planted their ladders, unseen and unheard; for the noise of their approach was drowned by the wind. The first who mounted were twelve men armed with short swords, led by Ammeas son of Corœbus. His followers, six on each side, proceeded immediately to secure the two nearest towers. Next came another party with short spears, their shields being carried by their comrades behind them. But before many more had mounted, the fall of a tile, broken off from a battlement by one of the Platæans, as he laid hold of it, alarmed the nearest sentinels, and presently the whole force of the besiegers was called to the walls. But no one knew what had happened, and the general confusion was increased by the sally of the besieged. All therefore remained at their posts; only a body of three hundred men, who were always in readiness to move toward any quarter where they might be needed, issued from one of the gates in search of the place from which the alarm had arisen. In the meanwhile the assailants had made themselves masters of the two towers between which they scaled the wall, and, after cutting down the sentinels, guarded the passages which led through them, while others mounted by ladders to the roofs, and thence discharged their missiles on all who attempted to approach the scene of action. The main body of the fugitives now poured through the opening thus secured, applying more ladders, and knocking away the battlements: and as they gained the other side of the outer ditch, they formed upon its edge, and with their arrows and javelins protected their comrades, who were crossing, from the enemy above. Last of all, and with some difficulty—for the ditch was deep, the water high, and covered with a thin crust of ice—the parties which occupied the towers effected their retreat; and they had scarcely crossed, before the three hundred were seen coming up with lighted torches. But their lights, which discovered nothing to them, made them a mark for the missiles of the Platæans, who were thus enabled to elude their pursuit, and to move away in good order.