History of the Peloponnesian War

Thus spake Brasidas. The Acanthians, after much said on either side, partly for that which Brasidas had effectually spoken and partly for fear of their fruits abroad, the most of them decreed to revolt from the Athenians, having given their votes in secret. And when they had made him take the same oath which the Lacedaemonian magistrates took when they sent him out, namely, that what confederates soever he should join to the Lacedaemonians should enjoy their own laws, they received his army into the city.

And not long after revolted Stageirus, another colony of the Andrians. And these were the acts of this summer.

In the very beginning of the next winter, when the Boeotian cities should have been delivered to Hippocrates and Demosthenes, generals of the Athenians, and Demosthenes should have gone to Siphae, and Hippocrates to Delium; having mistaken the days on which they should have both set forward, Demosthenes went to Siphae first, and having with him the Acarnans and many confederates of those parts in his fleet, [yet] lost his labour. For the treason was detected by one Nicomachus, a Phocean of the town of Phanotis, who told it unto the Lacedaemonians, and they again unto the Boeotians.

Whereby the Boeotians, concurring universally to relieve those places (for Hippocrates was not yet gone to trouble them in their own several territories), preoccupied both Siphae and Chaeroneia. And the conspirators, knowing the error, attempted in those cities no further.

But Hippocrates, having raised the whole power of the city of Athens, both citizens and others that dwelt amongst them and all strangers that were then there, arrived afterwards at Delium when the Boeotians were now returned from Siphae; and there stayed and took, in Delium, a temple of Apollo, with a wall, in this manner:

Round about the temple and the whole consecrated ground they drew a ditch; and out of the ditch, instead of a wall they cast up the earth; and having driven down piles on either side, they cast thereinto the matter of the vineyard about the temple, which to that purpose they cut down, together with the stones and bricks of the ruined buildings; and by all means heightened the fortification, and in such places as would give leave, erected turrets of wood upon the same.