Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/141

 BEGINNING OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR. H9 On the first entrance of the Theban assailants at night, a mes- senger had started from Platasa to carry the news to Athens : a second messenger followed him to report the victory and capture of the prisoners, as soon as it had been achieved. The Athenians sent back a herald without delay, enjoining the Plataeans to take no step respecting the prisoners until consultation should be had with Athens. Perikles doubtless feared what turned out to be the fact : for the prisoners had been slain before his messenger could arrive. Apart from the terms of the convention, and look- ing only to the received practice of ancient warfare, their de- struction could not be denounced as unusually cruel, though the Thebans, when fortune was in their favor, chose to designate it as such, 1 but impartial contemporaries would notice, and the Athenians in particular would deeply lament, the glaring impol- icy of the act. For Thebes, the best thing of all would of course be to get back her captured citizens forthwith : but next to that, the least evil would be to hear that they had been put to death. In the hands of the Athenians and Platseans, they would have been the means of obtaining from her much more valuable sa- crifices than their lives, considered as a portion of Theban power, were worth : so strong was the feeling of sympathy for impris- oned citizens, several of them men of rank and importance, as may be seen by the past conduct of Athens after the battle of Koroneia, and by that of Sparta, hereafter to be recounted, after the taking of Sphakteria. The Plataeans, obeying the simple instinct of wrath and vengeance, threw away this great political advantage, which the more long-sighted Perikles would gladly have turned to account. At the time when the Athenians sent their herald to Platzea, they also issued orders for seizing all Boeotians who might be found in Attica ; while they lost no time in sending forces to provision Platsea, and placing it on the footing of a garrison force arriving from Athens, and that the Platseans then destroyed theii prisoners in the town. Demosthenes mentions nothing about any conven tion between the Plataeans and the Thebans without the town, respecting the Theban prisoners within. On every point on which the narrative of Thucydides differs from thai of Demosthenes, that of the former stands out as the most coherent an<? credible J Thucyd. iii, 66.