Read Online The Campaigns of Alexander (Classics) by Arrian - Free Book Online

resistance. They burst into houses and killed the occupants; others they cut down as they attempted to show fight; others, again, even as they clung to temple altars, sparing neither women nor children. 23
    The violence of the action, the size and importance of the fallen city, above all, perhaps, the unexpectedness of the event both to victors and vanquished, all made the horror of this disaster to men of Grecian blood hardly less shattering for the rest of Greece, than for those who were actually involved. The Sicilian expedition, measured merely by the number of dead, brought a comparable disaster to Athens; but that, it must be remembered, took place far from home: the army which perished was not a native army, but consisted largely of troops from allied states; Athens herself remained untouched, still able to hold out for a number of years against Persia and the Lacedaemonian confederacy; and for all these reasons her defeat in Sicily did not bring to Athens the same sense of overwhelming calamity, or to the rest of Greece a comparable thrill of horror. 24 Again, the defeat at Aegospotami was at sea, and though Athens by that defeat sufferedhumiliation in the destruction of her Long Walls, the surrender of the greater part of her navy, and the loss of her empire, she nevertheless retained her hereditary form of government and quickly recovered her former strength; indeed, the Long Walls were rebuilt, her sea-power was regained, and she was actually able subsequently to reverse the position and save from great danger those very Lacedaemonians who had once been so formidable and had come so near to destroying her. 25 The Lacedaemonians themselves, after the defeats at Leuctra and Mantinea, were shaken rather by the unexpectedness of the disaster than by the magnitude of their losses; and it was the strangeness of the sight when the Boeotians and Arcadians under Epaminondas launched their attack upon Sparta, much more than the immediacy of the danger, that struck terror into them and their allies. 26 Again, the capture of Plataea cannot be considered a major disaster; forthe town was a small one, and, as most of its people had already fled to Athens for refuge, very few were taken when it fell; and, lastly, the capture of Melos and Scione was hardly more important: they were merely island communities, and their destruction, though a disgrace to its perpetrators, could scarcely be called a severe shock to Greece as a whole. 27
    With Thebes, on the contrary, it was a different matter: the lack of planning, the rapid movement of events which led to the revolt, the suddenness and ease with which the city fell, the slaughter, so appalling and so inevitable where men of kindred stock are paying off old scores, the complete enslavement of a city pre-eminent in Greece for power and military prestige, were, not unnaturally, all put down to the wrath of God. People felt that Thebes, at long last, had been punished for her treachery – she had paid the penalty for her betrayal of Greece in the Persian war, her capture of Plataea during the truce, the merciless enslavement of its population, and the massacre, for which she alone was responsible, of men who had surrendered not to her, but to Sparta, and the devastation of a countryside in which the united armies of Greece had driven back the Persian invader, and, lastly, for the murderous malignancy she showed towards Athens when she voted in favour of the suggestion, put forward by the Lacedaemonian confederacy, that the people of Athens should be sold into slavery. 28 Everyone now declared that thecalamity had been preceded by many warning signs from heaven – signs ignored at the moment, but remembered now, long afterwards, and clearly proved by the event to have been prophetic of the coming doom. 29
    The allied troops who took part in the fighting were entrusted by Alexander with the final settlement of the fate of Thebes. They decided to garrison the Cadmeia, but to raze the city