Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/212

 190 HISTORY OF GREECE. the wall, th chain was suddenly let go, and the beam fell down with great violence directly upon the engine and broke off its projecting beak. 1 However rude these defensive processes may seem, they were found effective against the besiegers, who saw themselves, at ti> close of three months' unavailing efforts, obliged to renounce the idea of taking the town in any other way than by the process of blockade and famine, a process alike tedious and costly. 2 Before they would incur so much inconvenience, however, they had recourse to one farther stratagem, that of trying to set the town on fire. From the height of their mound, they .^rew down large quantities of fagots, partly into the space be- tween the mound and the newly -built crescent piece of wall, partly, as far as they could reach, into other parts of the city : pitch and other combustibles were next added, and the whole mass set on fire. The conflagration was tremendous, such as had never been before seen : a large portion of the town became unapproachable, and the whole of it narrowly escaped destruc- tion. Nothing could have preserved it, had the wind been rather more favorable: there was indeed a farther story, of a most opportune thunder-storm coming to extinguish the flames, which ThucydideJ does not seem to credit. 3 In spite of much partial damage, the town remained still defensible, and the spirit of the inhabitants unsubdued. There now remained no other resource except to build a wall of circumvallation round Plata^a, and trust to the slow process of famine. The task was distributed in suitable fractions among the various confederate cities, and completed about the middle of September, a little before the autumnal equinox.* Two dis- 1 The various processes, such as those here described, employed both for offence and defence in the ancient sieges, are noticed and discussed in JEucaa Poliorketic. c. 33, seq. * Thucyd. ii, 76. 4 Thucyd. ii, 78. not k^eiS}) irdv e&ipyaaTo Trepl 'Apurovpov i-iroXHf, etc. at the period of the year when the star Arcturus rises immediately before sunrise, that is, sometime between the 12th and 17th of September: see Goller's note on the passage. Thucydides does not often give any fixed marks to discriminate the various periods of the year, as we find it her* done. The Greek month's were all lunar months, or nominally so : the
 * Thucyd. ii, 77.