Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/363

345 ATHENIAN PRISONERS AT SYRACUSE. 34f) Athenians served as auxiliaries to repel the attacks of the Syra cusans upon Katana. 1 It was in this manner, chiefly, that Athens came to receive again within her bosom a few of those ill-fated sons whom she had drafted forth in two such splendid divisions to Sicily. For of those who were carried as prisoners to Syracuse, fewer yet could ever have get home. They were placed for safe custody, along with the other prisoners, in the stone-quarries of Syracuse, of which there v/ere several, partly on the southern descent of the outer city towards the Nekropolis, or from the higher level to the lower level of Achradina, partly in the suburb afterwards called Neapolis, under the southern cliff of Epipolce. Into these quarries deep hollows of confined space, with precipitous sides, and open at the top to the sky the miserable prisoners were plunged, lying huddled one upon another, without the smallest protection or convenience. For subsistence, they received each day a ration of one pint of wheaten bread, half the daily ration of a slave, with no more than half a pint of water, so that they were not preserved from the pangs either of hunger or of thirst. Moreover, the heat of the midday sun, alternating with the chill of the autumn nights, was alike afflicting and destructive ; while the wants of life having all to be performed where they were, without relief, the filth and stench presently became insupportable. Sick and wounded even at the moment of arrival, many of them speedily died ; and happiest was he who died the first, leaving an unconscious corpse, which the Syracusans would not take the trouble to remove, to distress and infect the survivors. Under this condition and treatment they remained for seventy days ; prob- ably serving as a spectacle for the triumphant Syracusan popu- lation, with their wives and children, to come and look down upon, and to congratulate themselves on their own narrow escape from sufferings similar in kind at least, if not in degree. Aftei that time the novelty of the spectacle had worn off, while the place must have become a den of abomination and a nuisance intol erable even to the citizens themselves. Accordingly, they now removed all the surviving prisoners, except the native Athenian: Lysias pro Polystr;vi:;>. Or:it. xx, sects. 26-28, c. 6, p. 686 R. 15*