Book 4
Therefore march on against the enemy, every one as becometh the dignity both of his natural city, which he glorieth to be chief of all Greece, and of his ancestors, who having overcome these men at Oenophyta under the conduct of Myronides, were in times past masters of all Boeotia.
Whiles Hippocrates was making this exhortation, and had gone with it over half the army, but [could proceed] no further, the Boeotians (for Pagondas likewise made but a short exhortation and had there sung the Paean) came down upon them from the hill. And the Athenians likewise went forward to meet them, [so fast that] they met together running.
The utmost parts of both the armies never came to join, hindered both by one and the same cause; for certain currents of water kept them asunder.
But the rest made sharp battle, standing close, and striving to put by each others' bucklers. The left wing of the Boeotians, to the very middle of the army, were overthrown by the Athenians, who in this part had to deal, amongst others, principally with the Thespians. For whilst they that were placed within the same wing gave back and were circled in by the Athenians in a narrow compass, those Thespians that were slain were hewed down in the very fight.
Some also of the Athenians themselves, troubled with inclosing them, through ignorance slew one another. So that the Boeotians were overcome in this part and fled to the other part where they were yet in fight.
But the right wing, wherein the Thebans stood, had the better of the Athenians, and by little and little forced them to give ground and followed upon them from the very first.
It happened also that Pagondas, while the left wing of his army was in distress, sent two companies of horse secretly about the hill, whereby that wing of the Athenians which was victorious, apprehending upon their sudden appearing that they had been a fresh army, was put into affright;
and the whole army of the Athenians, now doubly terrified by this accident and by the Thebans that continually won ground and brake their ranks, betook themselves to flight. Some fled toward Delium and the sea, and some towards Oropus;
others toward the mountain Parnethus, and others other ways, as to each appeared hope of safety. The Boeotians, especially their horse and those Locrians that came in after the enemy was already defeated, followed killing them. But night surprising them, the multitude of them that fled was the easier saved.
The next day those that were gotten to Oropus and Delium went thence by sea to Athens, having left a garrison in Delium, which place, notwithstanding this defeat, they yet retained.
The Boeotians, when they had erected their trophy, taken away their own dead, rifled those of the enemy, and left a guard upon the place, returned back to Tanagra and there entered into consultation for an assault to be made on Delium.
In the meantime, a herald sent from the Athenians to require the bodies met with a herald by the way sent by the Boeotians, which turned him back by telling him he could get nothing done till himself was returned from the Athenians. This herald, when he came before the Athenians, delivered unto them what the Boeotians had given him in charge, namely, that they had done unjustly to transgress the universal law of the Grecians, being a constitution received by them all;
that the invader of another's country should abstain from all holy places in the same; that the Athenians had fortified Delium and dwelt in it, and done whatsoever else men use to do in places profane, and had drawn that water to the common use, which was unlawful for themselves to have touched, save only to wash their hands for the sacrifice;
that therefore the Boeotians, both in the behalf of the god and of themselves, invoking Apollo and all the interested spirits, did warn them to be gone and to remove their stuff out of the temple.
After the herald had said this, the Athenians sent a herald of their own to the Boeotians, denying that either they had done any wrong to the holy place already or would willingly do any hurt to it hereafter; for neither did they at first enter into it to such intent, but to requite the greater injuries which had been done unto them;
as for the law which the Grecians have, it is no other but that they which have the dominion of any territory, great or small, have ever the temples also, and besides the accustomed rites, may superinduce what other they can:
for also the Boeotians, and most men else, all that having driven out another nation possess their territory, did at first invade the temples of others and make them their own;
that therefore, if they could win from them more of their land, they would keep it, and for the part they were now in, they were in it with a good will and would not out of it, as being their own; that for the water, they meddled with it upon necessity;
which was not to be ascribed to insolence, but to this, that fighting against the Boeotians that had invaded their territory first, they were forced to use it;
for whatsoever is forced by war or danger hath in reason a kind of pardon even with the god himself; for the altars, in cases of involuntary offences, are a refuge, and they are said to violate laws that are evil without constraint, not they that are a little bold upon occasion of distress;
that the Boeotians themselves, who require restitution of the holy places for a redemption of the dead, are more irreligious by far than they, who, rather than let their temples go, are content to go without that which were fit for them to receive;
and they bade him say plainly that they would not depart out of the Boeotian territory, for that they were not now in it, but in a territory which they had made their own by the sword; and nevertheless, required truce, according to the ordinances of the country, for the fetching away of the dead.
To this the Boeotians answered that if the dead were in Boeotia, they should quit the ground and take with them whatsoever was theirs; but if the dead were in their own territory, the Athenians themselves knew best what to do. For they thought that though Oropia, wherein the dead lay (for the battle was fought in the border between Attica and Boeotia), by subjection belonged to the Athenians, yet they could not fetch them off by force; and for truce that the Athenians might come safely on Athenian ground, they would give none, but conceived it was a handsome answer to say that if they would quit the ground, they should obtain whatsoever they required. Which when the Athenian herald heard, he went his way without effect.
The Boeotians presently sent for darters and slingers from [the towns on] the Melian gulf; and with these, and with two thousand men of arms of Corinth, and with the Peloponnesian garrison that was put out of Nisaea, and with the Megareans, all which arrived after the battle, they marched forthwith to Delium and assaulted the wall. And when they had attempted the same many other ways, at length they brought to it an engine, wherewith they also took it, made in this manner:
Having slit in two a great mast, they made hollow both the sides, and curiously set them together again in the form of a pipe. At the end of it in chains they hung a cauldron; and into the cauldron from the end of the mast they conveyed a snout of iron, having with iron also armed a great part of the rest of the wood.
They carried it to the wall, being far off, in carts, to that part where it was most made up with the matter of the vineyard and with wood.
And when it was to, they applied a pair of great bellows to the end next themselves, and blew. The blast, passing narrowly through into the cauldron, in which were coals of fire, brimstone, and pitch, raised an exceeding great flame, and set the wall on fire, so that no man being able to stand any longer on it, but abandoning the same and betaking themselves to flight, the wall was by that means taken.
Of the defendants, some were slain and two hundred taken prisoners; the rest of the number recovered their galleys and got home.
Delium thus taken on the seventeenth day after the battle, and the herald, which not long after was sent again about the fetching away of the dead, not knowing it, the Boeotians let him have them, and answered no more as they had formerly done.
In the battle there died Boeotians few less than five hundred; the Athenians few less than a thousand, with Hippocrates the general; but of light-armed soldiers and such as carried the provisions of the army, a great number.
Not long after this battle, Demosthenes, that had been with his army at Siphae, seeing the treason succeeded not, having aboard his galleys his army of Acarnanians and Agraeans and four hundred men of arms of Athens, landed in Sicyonia. But before all his galleys came to shore, the Sicyonians, who went out to defend their territory, put to flight such as were already landed and chased them back to their galleys, having also slain some and taken some alive.
And when they had erected a trophy, they gave truce to the Athenians for the fetching away of their dead.
About the time that these things passed at Delium, died Sitalces, king of the Odrysians, overcome in battle in an expedition against the Triballians. And Seuthes, the son of Spardocus, his brother's son, succeeded him in the kingdom, both of the Odrysians and of the rest of Thrace as much as was before subject to Sitalces.
The same winter, Brasidas with the confederates in Thrace made war upon Amphipolis, a colony of the Athenians, situated on the river Strymon.
The place whereon the city now standeth, Aristagoras of Miletus had formerly attempted to inhabit when he fled from king Darius, but was beaten away by the Edonians. Two-and-thirty years after this, the Athenians assayed the same, and sent thither ten thousand of their own city, and of others as many as would go; and these were destroyed all by the Thracians at Drabescus.
In the twenty-ninth year after, conducted by Agnon, the son of Nicias, the Athenians came again, and having driven out the Edonians, became founders of this place, formerly called the Nine-ways. His army lay then at Eion, a town of traffic by the seaside subject to the Athenians, at the mouth of the river Strymon, five-andtwenty furlongs from the city. Agnon named this city Amphipolis because it was surrounded by the river Strymon, that runs on either side it. When he had taken it in with a long wall from river to river, he put inhabitants into the place, being conspicuous round about both to the sea and land.
Against this city marched Brasidas with his army, dislodging from Arnae in Chalcidea. Being about twilight come as far as Aulon and Bromiscus, where the lake Bolbe entereth into the sea, he caused his army to sup, and then marched forward by night.
The weather was foul, and a little it snowed, which also made him to march the rather, as desiring that none of Amphipolis, but only the traitors, should be aware of his coming.
For there were both Argilians that dwelt in the same city (now Argilus is a colony of the Andrians), and others, that contrived this, induced thereunto some by Perdiccas and some by the Chalcideans.
But above all the Argilians, being of a city near unto it, and ever suspected by the Athenians, and secret enemies to the place, as soon as opportunity was offered and Brasidas arrived (who had also long before dealt underhand with as many of them as dwelt in Amphipolis to betray it), both received him into their own city, and revolting from the Athenians, brought the army forward the same night as far as to the bridge of the river.