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About the same time the Lacedaemonians who were besieging Plataea threw a wall about the city and kept a guard over it of many soldiers. And as the siege dragged on and the Athenians still sent them no help, the besieged not only were suffering from lack of food but had also lost many of their fellow citizens in the assaults. [2] While they were thus at a loss and were conferring together how they could be saved, the majority were of the opinion that they should make no move, but the rest, some two hundred in number, decided to force a passage through the guards by night and make their way to Athens. [3] And so, on a moonless night for which they had waited, they persuaded the rest of the Plataeans to make an assault upon one side of the encircling wall; they themselves then made ready ladders, and when the enemy rushed to defend the opposite parts of the walls, they managed by means of the ladders to get up on the wall, and after slaying the guards they made their escape to Athens. [4] The next day the Lacedaemonians, provoked at the flight of the men who had got away from the city, made an assault upon the city of the Plataeans and strained every nerve to subdue the besieged by storm; and the Plataeans in dismay sent envoys to the enemy and surrendered to them both themselves and the city. [5] The commanders of the Lacedaemonians, summoning the Plataeans one by one, asked what good deed he had ever performed for the Lacedaemonians, and when each confessed that he had done them no good turn, they asked further if he had ever done the Spartans any harm; and when not a man could deny that he had, they condemned all of them to death. [6] Consequently they slew all who still remained, razed the city to the ground, and farmed out its territory. So the Plataeans, who had maintained with the greatest constancy their alliance with the Athenians, fell unjust victims to the most tragic fate.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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