History of the Peloponnesian War

To this the Boeotians answered that if the dead were in Boeotia, they should quit the ground and take with them whatsoever was theirs; but if the dead were in their own territory, the Athenians themselves knew best what to do. For they thought that though Oropia, wherein the dead lay (for the battle was fought in the border between Attica and Boeotia), by subjection belonged to the Athenians, yet they could not fetch them off by force; and for truce that the Athenians might come safely on Athenian ground, they would give none, but conceived it was a handsome answer to say that if they would quit the ground, they should obtain whatsoever they required. Which when the Athenian herald heard, he went his way without effect.

The Boeotians presently sent for darters and slingers from [the towns on] the Melian gulf; and with these, and with two thousand men of arms of Corinth, and with the Peloponnesian garrison that was put out of Nisaea, and with the Megareans, all which arrived after the battle, they marched forthwith to Delium and assaulted the wall. And when they had attempted the same many other ways, at length they brought to it an engine, wherewith they also took it, made in this manner:

Having slit in two a great mast, they made hollow both the sides, and curiously set them together again in the form of a pipe. At the end of it in chains they hung a cauldron; and into the cauldron from the end of the mast they conveyed a snout of iron, having with iron also armed a great part of the rest of the wood.

They carried it to the wall, being far off, in carts, to that part where it was most made up with the matter of the vineyard and with wood.

And when it was to, they applied a pair of great bellows to the end next themselves, and blew. The blast, passing narrowly through into the cauldron, in which were coals of fire, brimstone, and pitch, raised an exceeding great flame, and set the wall on fire, so that no man being able to stand any longer on it, but abandoning the same and betaking themselves to flight, the wall was by that means taken.

Of the defendants, some were slain and two hundred taken prisoners; the rest of the number recovered their galleys and got home.

Delium thus taken on the seventeenth day after the battle, and the herald, which not long after was sent again about the fetching away of the dead, not knowing it, the Boeotians let him have them, and answered no more as they had formerly done.

In the battle there died Boeotians few less than five hundred; the Athenians few less than a thousand, with Hippocrates the general; but of light-armed soldiers and such as carried the provisions of the army, a great number.