Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/381

 SLAUGHTER OF THE KORKYILEAN PRISONERS. 353 Those who loitered in the march were hurried on by whips from behind : as they advanced, their private enemies on both sides singled them out, striking and piercing them until at length they miserably perished. Three successive companies were thus destroyed, ere the remaining prisoners in the interior, who thought merely that their place of detention was about to be changed, suspected what was passing : at length they found it out, and one and all then refused either to quit the building or to permit any one else to enter. They at the same time piteously implored the intervention of the Athenians, if it were only to kill them, and thus preserve them from the cruelties of their merciless countrymen. The latter abstained from attempts to force the door of the building, but made an aperture in the roof, from whence they shot down arrows, and poured showers of tiles, upon the prisoners within ; who sought at first to protect them- selves, but at length abandoned themselves to despair, and as- sisted with their own hands in the work of destruction. Some of them pierced their throats with the arrows shot doAvn from the roof : others hung themselves, either with cords from some bed- ding which happened to be in the building, or with strips torn and twisted from their own garments. Night came on, but the work of destruction, both from above and within, was continued without intermission, so that before morning all these wretched men perished, either by the hands of their enemies or by their own. At daybreak, the Korkyrceans entered the building, piled up the dead bodies on carts, and transported them out of the city : the exact number we are not told, but seemingly it cannot have been less than three hundred. The women who had been taken at Istone along with these prisoners, were all sold as slaves. 1 Thus finished the bloody dissensions in this ill-fated island : for the oligarchical party were completely annihilated, the democ- racy was victorious, and there were no farther violences through- out the whole war. 3 It will be recollected that these deadly feuds began with the return of the oligarchical prisoners from Corinth, bringing along with them projects both of treason and of revolution : they ended with the annihilation of that party, in 1 Thucyd. ir, 47, 48. * Thucyd. iv, 48,