History of the Peloponnesian War

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.

There was no edifice of the temple standing, for the cloister that had been was fallen down. They began the work the third day after they set forth from Athens and wrought all the same day and all the fourth and the fifth day till dinner.

And then being most part of it finished, the camp came back from Delium about ten furlongs homewards. And the lightarmed soldiers went most of them presently away; but the men of arms laid down their arms there and rested. Hippocrates stayed yet behind and took order about the garrison and about the finishing of the remainder of the fortification.

The Boeotians took the same time to assemble at Tanagra; and when all the forces were come in that from every city were expected, and when they understood that the Athenians drew homewards, though the rest of the Boeotian commanders, which were eleven, approved not giving battle, because they were not now in Boeotia (for the Athenians, when they laid down their arms, were in the confines of Oropia); yet Pagondas, the son of Aioladas, being the Boeotian commander for Thebes, whose turn it was to have the leading of the army, was, together with Arianthidas, the son of Lysimachidas, of opinion to fight, and held it the best course to try the fortune of a battle; wherefore calling them unto him every company by itself, that they might not be all at once from their arms, he exhorted the Boeotians to march against the Athenians and to hazard battle, speaking in this manner: