Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/286

 261 HISTORY OF GREECE. the importance attached to that protest, and the emphatic detail with which it is set forth in Thucydides. The five judges, as their only reply to the two harangues, again called the Platasans before them, and repeated to every one of thdin individually, the same question which had before been put : each one of them, as he successively replied in the negative, 1 was taken away and killed, together with the twenty-five Athenian prisoners. The women captured were sold as slaves : and the town and territory of Plataea were handed over to the Thebans, who at first estab- lished in them a few oligarchical Platoean exiles, together with some Megarian exiles, but after a few months recalled this step, and blotted out Plate, 2 as a separate town and territory, from the muster-roll of Hellas. They pulled down all the private buildings and employed the materials to build a vast barrack all round the Heraeum, or temple of Here, two hundred feet in every direction, with apartments of two stories above and below ; partly as accommodation for visitors to the temple, partly as an abode for the tenant-farmers or graziers who were to occupy the land. A new temple of one hundred feet in length, was also built in honor of Here, and ornamented with couches, prepared from the brass and iron furniture found in the private houses of the Pla- tasans. 3 The Plataean territory was let out for ten years, as public property belonging to Thebes, and was hired by private Theban cultivators. Such was the melancholy fate of Plataea, after sustaining a blockade of about two years. 4 Its identity and local traditions 1 Diodorus (xii, 56) in his meagre abridgment of the siege and fate of Plataea, somewhat amplifies the brevity and simplicity of the question as given by Thucydides. 1 Thucyd. iii. 57. vpuc de (you Spartans) KOI etc iravrbf TOV 'E/J-r/vinov TravoiKTjaia 6iu Qrjflaiovc (HXuraiav) i^aAel^ai. 3 Thucyd. iii, 69. 4 Demosthenes or the Pseudo-Demosthenes in the oration against Ncaera (p. 1380, c. 25), says that the blockade of Plataea was continued for ten years before it surrendered, knol.ibpKOW avroif <5t;ivl<p r'^ft TTE- oiTctxiaav-Ec de/ca ETTJ. That the real duration of the blockade was only two years, is most certain : accordingly, several eminent critics Palme- rius, Wasse, Duker, Taylor, Auger, etc., all with one accord confidently enjoin us tD correct the text of Demosthenes from fo'xa to 6vo. " Eepone fiden-'er 6vc" says Duker.