History of the Peloponnesian War

Having thus appealed to the gods, he set his army to the war. In the first place he enclosed them with a palisade, made of the trees which they cut down, that no one might go out of the town any longer.

Next they began to throw up a mound against the city, hoping that the reduction of it would be very speedily effected with so large an army at work. Cutting down timber therefore from Cithaeron, they built it up on each side, laying it like lattice-work, to serve as walls, that the mound might not spread over a wide space;