114.
It was now daylight, and the city being completely in his power, Brasidas made proclamation to the Toronaeans who had taken refuge with the Athenians, that if they liked they might come out and return to their homes; they would suffer no harm in the city. He also sent a herald to the Athenians, bidding them take what was their own and depart under a flag of truce out of Lecythus. The place, he said, belonged to the Chalcidians,1 and not to them.
[2]
They refused to go, but asked him to make a truce with them for a day, that they might take up their dead, and he granted them two days. During these two days he fortified the buildings which were near Lecythus, and the Athenians strengthened the fort itself.
[3]
He then called a meeting of the Toronaeans, and addressed them much in the same terms which he had used at Acanthus2. He told them that they ought not to think badly of those citizens who had aided him, much less to deem them traitors; for they were not bribed and had not acted with any view of enslaving the city, but in the interest of her freedom and welfare. Those of the inhabitants who had not joined in the plot were not to suppose that they would fare worse than the rest; for he had not come thither to destroy either the city or any of her citizens.
[4]
In this spirit he had made the proclamation to those who had taken refuge with the Athenians, and he thought none the worse of them for being their friends; when they had a similar experience of the Lacedaemonians their attachment to them would be still greater, for they would recognize their superior honesty; they were only afraid of them now because they did not know them.
[5]
They must all make up their minds to be faithful allies, and expect henceforward to be held responsible if they offended; but in the past the Lacedaemonians had not been wronged by them; on the contrary, it was they who had been wronged by a power too great for them, and were to be excused if they had opposed him.
Thucydides translated into English; with introduction, marginal analysis, notes, and indices. Volume 1. Thucydides. Benjamin Jowett. translator. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1881.
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