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[5] Their enemies came there, too, and during the night were overrun by a horde of field mice1 that gnawed quivers and bows and the handles of shields, with the result that many were killed fleeing unarmed the next day.

1 This is Hdt.'s version of the Jewish story of the pestilence which destroyed the Assyrian army before Jerusalem. Mice are a Greek symbol of pestilence; it is Apollo Smintheus (the mouse god) who sends and then ends the plague in Hom. Il. 1. It has long been known that rats are carriers of the plague.

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