previous next


ὑποκατημένους: transitive here only, ‘awaiting’; cf. vii. 27. 1. E. Meyer (iii, § 222) holds that this idea only grew up after the campaign of Plataea, and that immediately after Thermopylae no one would have contemplated a pitched battle in Boeotia with Xerxes (cf. App. XX, § 2). The Spartans had no doubt promised that Attica should be defended, but they meant to fulfil their promise at Thermopylae and not on Mount Cithaeron. And whatever the ‘man in the street’ at Athens may have expected, the leaders must have known that resistance in Boeotia was out of the question, and must have ordered the evacuation of Attica as soon as they heard that Thermopylae was lost, since the people had time to emigrate en masse before Xerxes reached Attica.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: