Page:Thucydides, translated into English Vol 2.djvu/74

 66 and shortly afterwards Stagirus, a colony of the Andrians, revolted also. Such were the events of the summer.

Meanwhile the betrayal of Boeotia into the hands of

Hippocrates and Demosthenes, the Athenian generals, was on the eve of accomplishment. At the beginning of the ensuing winter Demosthenes and his fleet were to appear at Siphae, and Hippocrates simultaneously to march upon Delium. But there was a mistake about the day, and Demosthenes, with his Acarnanian and numerous other allies drawn from that neighbourhood, sailed to Siphae too soon. His attempt failed ; for the plot was betrayed by Nicomachus a Phocian, of the town of Phanoteus, who told the Lacedaemonians, and they the Boeotians. Where- upon there was a general levy of the Boeotians, for Hippo- crates, who was to have been in the country and to have distracted their attention, had not yet arrived ; and so they forestalled the Athenians by the occupation of Siphae and Chaeronea. When the conspirators in the Boeotian cities saw that there had been a mistake they made no movement from within.

Hippocrates had called out the whole force of Athens,

metics as Well as citizens, and all the strangers who were then in the city. But he did not arrive at Delium until after the Boeotians had quitted Siphae. He encamped and fortified Delium, which is a temple of Apollo. His army dug a trench around the temple and the sacred precinct, the earth which they threw up out of the trench forming a rampart; along this rampart they drove in a double palisade, and cutting down the vines in the neighbourhood of the temple threw them in between. They made a like use of the stones and bricks of the houses near, which they pulled down, and by every means in their power strove to increase the height of the rampart. Where the temple buildings did not extend they erected wooden towers at convenient places ; the cloister which