law which they have broken; and to us, the victims of its violation,
grant the reward merited by our zeal. Nor let us be supplanted in your
favour by their harangues, but offer an example to the Hellenes,
that the contests to which you invite them are of deeds, not words:
good deeds can be shortly stated, but where wrong is done a wealth
of language is needed to veil its deformity. However, if leading
powers were to do what you are now doing, and putting one short
question to all alike were to decide accordingly, men would be less
tempted to seek fine phrases to cover bad actions."
Such were the words of the Thebans. The Lacedaemonian judges decided
that the question whether they had received any service from the
Plataeans in the war, was a fair one for them to put; as they had
always invited them to be neutral, agreeably to the original
covenant of Pausanias after the defeat of the Mede, and had again
definitely offered them the same conditions before the blockade.
This offer having been refused, they were now, they conceived, by
the loyalty of their intention released from their covenant; and
having, as they considered, suffered evil at the hands of the
Plataeans, they brought them in again one by one and asked each of
them the same question, that is to say, whether they had done the
Lacedaemonians and allies any service in the war; and upon their
saying that they had not, took them out and slew them, all without
exception. The number of Plataeans thus massacred was not less than
two hundred, with twenty-five Athenians who had shared in the siege.
The women were taken as slaves. The city the Thebans gave for about
a year to some political emigrants from Megara and to the surviving
Plataeans of their own party to inhabit, and afterwards razed it to
the ground from the very foundations, and built on to the precinct
of Hera an inn two hundred feet square, with rooms all round above and
below, making use for this purpose of the roofs and doors of the
Plataeans: of the rest of the materials in the wall, the brass and the
iron, they made couches which they dedicated to Hera, for whom they
also built a stone chapel of a hundred feet square. The land they
confiscated and let out on a ten years' lease to Theban occupiers. The
adverse attitude of the Lacedaemonians in the whole Plataean affair
was mainly adopted to please the Thebans, who were thought to be
useful in the war at that moment raging. Such was the end of
Plataea, in the ninety-third year after she became the ally of Athens.
Meanwhile, the forty ships of the Peloponnesians that had gone to
the relief of the Lesbians, and which we left flying across the open
sea, pursued by the Athenians, were caught in a storm off Crete, and
scattering from thence made their way to Peloponnese, where they found
at Cyllene thirteen Leucadian and Ambraciot galleys, with Brasidas,
son of Tellis, lately arrived as counsellor to Alcidas; the
Lacedaemonians, upon the failure of the Lesbian expedition, having
resolved to strengthen their fleet and sail to Corcyra, where a
revolution had broken out, so as to arrive there before the twelve
Athenian ships at Naupactus could be reinforced from Athens.
Brasidas and Alcidas began to prepare accordingly.
The Corcyraean revolution began with the return of the prisoners
taken in the sea-fights off Epidamnus. These the Corinthians had
released, nominally upon the security of eight hundred talents given
by their proxeni, but in reality upon their engagement to bring over
Corcyra to Corinth. These men proceeded to canvass each of the
citizens, and to intrigue with the view of detaching the city from
Athens. Upon the arrival of an Athenian and a Corinthian vessel,
with envoys on board, a conference was held in which the Corcyraeans
voted to remain allies of the Athenians according to their
agreement, but to be friends of the Peloponnesians as they had been
formerly. Meanwhile, the returned prisoners brought Peithias, a
volunteer proxenus of the Athenians and leader of the commons, to
trial, upon the charge of enslaving Corcyra to Athens. He, being
acquitted, retorted by accusing five of the richest of their number of
cutting stakes in the ground sacred to Zeus and Alcinous; the legal