All the details of the plan seem to have been concerted with admirable forethought. On the first alarm fire signals were raised by the besiegers to convey the intelligence to Thebes. But the Platæans had provided against this danger, and showed similar signals from their own walls, so as to render it impossible for the Thebans to interpret those of the enemy. This precaution afforded additional security to their retreat. For instead of taking the nearest road to Athens, they first bent their steps toward Thebes, while they could see their pursuers with their blazing torches threading the ascent of Cithæron. After they had followed the Theban road for six or seven furlongs, they struck into that which led by Erythræ and Hysiæ to the Attic border, and arrived safe at Athens. Out of the 220 who set out together, one fell into the enemy’s hands, after he had crossed the outer ditch. Seven turned back panic-struck, and reported that all their companions had been cut off: and at daybreak a herald was sent to recover their bodies. The answer revealed the happy issue of the adventure.

[427 B.C.]

By this time the remaining garrison of Platæa was reduced to the last stage of weakness. The besiegers might probably long before have taken the town without difficulty by assault. But the Spartans had a motive of policy for wishing to bring the siege to a different termination. They looked forward to a peace which they might have to conclude upon the ordinary terms of a mutual restitution of conquests made in the war. In this case, if Platæa fell by storm, they would be obliged to restore it to Athens; but if it capitulated, they might allege that it was no conquest. With this view their commander protracted the blockade, until at length he discovered by a feint attack that the garrison was utterly unable to defend the walls. He then sent a herald to propose that they should surrender, not to the Thebans, but to the Spartans, on condition that Spartan judges alone should decide upon their fate. These terms were accepted, the town delivered up, and the garrison, which was nearly starved, received a supply of food. In a few days five commissioners came from Sparta to hold the promised trial. But instead of the usual forms of accusation and defence, the prisoners found themselves called upon to answer a single question: Whether in the course of the war they had done any service to Sparta and her allies. The spirit which dictated such an interrogatory was clear enough. The prisoners however obtained leave to plead for themselves without restriction; their defence was conducted by two of their number, one of whom, Lacon son of Aimnestus, was proxenus of Sparta.

The arguments of the Platæan orators, as reported by Thucydides, are strong, and the address which he attributes to them is the only specimen he has left of pathetic eloquence. They could point out the absurdity of sending five commissioners from Sparta, to inquire whether the garrison of a besieged town were friends of the besiegers; a question which, if retorted upon the party which asked it, would equally convict them of a wanton aggression. They could appeal to their services and sufferings in the Persian War, when they alone among the Bœotians remained constant to the cause of Greece, while the Thebans had fought on the side of the barbarians in the very land which they now hoped to make their own with the consent of Sparta. They could plead an important obligation which they had more recently conferred on Sparta herself, whom they had succoured with a third part of their whole force, when her very existence was threatened by the revolt of the Messenians after the great earthquake. They could urge that their alliance with Athens had been originally formed with the approbation, and even by the advice, of the Spartans themselves; that justice and honour forbade them to renounce a connection which they had sought as a favour, and from which they had derived great advantages; and that, as far as lay in themselves, they had not broken the last peace, but had been treacherously surprised by the Thebans, while they thought themselves secure in the faith of treaties. Even if their former merits were not sufficient to outweigh any later offence which could be imputed to them, they might insist on the Greek usage of war, which forbade proceeding to the last extremity with an enemy who had voluntarily surrendered himself; and as they had proved, by the patience with which they had endured the torments of hunger, that they preferred perishing by famine to falling into the hands of the Thebans, they had a right to demand that they should not be placed in a worse condition by their own act, but if they were to gain nothing by their capitulation, should be restored to the state in which they were when they made it.

But unhappily for the Platæans they had nothing to rely upon but the mercy or the honour of Sparta: two principles which never appear to have had the weight of a feather in any of her public transactions; and though the Spartan commissioners bore the title of judges, they came in fact only to pronounce a sentence which had been previously dictated by Thebes. Yet the appeal of the Platæans was so affecting, that the Thebans distrusted the firmness of their allies, and obtained leave to reply. They very judiciously and honestly treated the question as one which lay entirely between the Platæans and themselves. They attributed the conduct of their ancestors in the Persian War, to the compulsion of a small, dominant faction, and pleaded the services which they had themselves since rendered to Sparta. They depreciated the patriotic deeds of the Platæans, as the result of their attachment to Athens, whom they had not scrupled to abet in all her undertakings against the liberties of Greece. They defended the attempt which they had made upon Platæa during the peace, on the ground that they had been invited by a number of its wealthiest and noblest citizens, and they charged the Platæans with a breach of faith in the execution of their Theban prisoners, whose blood called for vengeance as loudly as they for mercy.

These were indeed reasons which fully explained and perhaps justified their own enmity to Platæa, and did not need to be aided by so glaring a falsehood, as the assertion that their enemies were enjoying the benefit of a fair trial. But the only part of their argument, that bore upon the real question, was that in which they reminded the Spartans that Thebes was their most powerful and useful ally. This the Spartans felt; and they had long determined that no scruples of justice or humanity should endanger so valuable a connection. But it seems that they still could not devise any more ingenious mode of reconciling their secret motive with outward decency, than the original question, which implied that if the prisoners were their enemies, they might rightfully put them to death; and in this sophistical abstraction all the claims which arose out of the capitulation, when construed according to the plainest rules of equity, were overlooked. The question was again proposed to each separately, and when the ceremony was finished by his answer or his silence, he was immediately consigned to the executioner. The Platæans who suffered amounted to two hundred; their fate was shared by twenty-five Athenians, who could not have expected or claimed milder treatment, as they might have been fairly excepted from the benefit of the surrender. The women were all made slaves. If there had been nothing but inhumanity in the proceeding of the Spartans, it would have been so much slighter than that which they had exhibited towards their most unoffending prisoners from the beginning of the war, as scarcely to deserve notice. All that is very signal in this transaction is the baseness of their cunning, and perhaps the dullness of their invention.

The town and its territory were, with better right, ceded to the Thebans. For a year they permitted the town to be occupied by a body of exiles from Megara, and by the remnant of the Platæans belonging to the Theban party. But afterwards—fearing perhaps that it might be wrested from them—they razed it to the ground, leaving only the temples standing. But on the site, and with the materials of the demolished buildings, they erected an edifice 200 feet square, with an upper story, the whole divided into apartments, for the reception of the pilgrims who might come to the quinquennial festival, or on other sacred occasions. They also built a new temple, which together with the brass and the iron found in the town, which were made into couches, they dedicated to Hera, the goddess to whom Pausanias was thought to have owed his victory. The territory was annexed to the Theban state lands, and let for a term of ten years. So, in the ninety-third year after Platæa had entered into alliance with Athens, this alliance became the cause of its ruin.[b]

NAVAL AND OTHER COMBATS

[429 B.C.]

While Archidamus was holding Platæa by the throat, other enterprises were meeting with varied success. Athens sent 2000 hoplites and 200 horse to Chalcidian Thrace under the Xenophon to whom Potidæa had surrendered. He made an assault on the town of Spartolus, only to lose a desperate battle, and to be crushed on his retreat; Xenophon and two associated generals were killed, and with them 430 hoplites, a loss of about 25 per cent.