Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/339

 VICTORY OF THE SPARTANS OVER ARGOS. 321 This came to the knowledge of Kleomenes, who communicated private notice to his soldiers, that when the herald proclaimed orders to go to dinner, they should not obey, but immediately stand to their arras. We are to presume that the Argeian camp was sufficiently near to that of the Lacedaemonians to enable them to hear the voice of the herald, yet not within sight, from the nature of the ground. Accordingly, so soon as the Argeians heard the herald in the enemy's camp proclaim the word to go to dinner, 1 they went to dinner themselves ; and in this disorderly condition they were easily overthrown by the Spartans. Many of them perished in the field, while the fugitives took refuge in a thick grove consecrated to their eponymous hero Argus. Kle- omenes pursued and inclosed them therein ; but thinking it safer to employ deceit rather than force, he ascertained from deserters the names of the chief Argeians thus shut up, and then invited them out successively by means of a herald, pretending that he had received their ransom, and that they were released. As fast as each man came out, he was put to death ; the fate of these unhappy sufferers being concealed from their comrades within the grove by the thickness of the foliage, until some one climb- ing to the top of a tree detected and proclaimed the destruction going on, after about fifty of the victims had perished. Un- able to entice any more of the Argeians from their consecrated refuge, which they still vainly hoped would protect them, Kle- omenes set fire to the grove, and burnt it to the ground, insomuch that the persons within it appear to have been destroyed, either by fire or by sword. 2 After the conflagration had begun, he in- quired for the first time to whom the grove belonged, and learnt that it belonged to the hero Argus. Not less than six thousand citizens, the flower ind strength of Argos, perished in this disastrous battle and retreat. And so completely was the city prostrated, that Kleomenes might easily have taken it, had he chosen to march thither forthwith and at- tack it with vigor. If we are to believe later historians whom 1 Herodot. vi, 78 ; compare Xenophon, Rep. Laced, xii, 6. Orders foi evolutions in the field, in the Lacedaemonian military service, were not proclaimed by the herald, but transmitted through the various gradation* of officers (Thucyd. v, 66). * Herodot. vi, 79, RO. VOL. IV 14* 2100.