History of the Peloponnesian War

The ambassadors having delivered this message, they resolved not to prove false to the Athenians, but to endure, it necessary, both to see their land ravaged, and to suffer whatever else might befall them. They resolved also that no one should go out again, but that they should reply from the walls, that it was impossible for them to do as the Lacedaemonians proposed.

When they had given this answer, king Archidamus proceeded in the first place to call to witness the gods and heroes of the country, in these words:

Ye gods and heroes that dwell in the land of Plataea, bear witness that it was neither unjustly in the first instance, but when these men had first broken the agreement they had sworn to, that we came against this land, in which our fathers prayed to you before they conquered the Medes, and which you rendered an auspicious one for the Greeks to contend in; nor shall we act unjustly now, whatever we may do; for though we have made many fair proposals, we have not succeeded in gaining their assent. Grant then that those may be punished for the wrong who were the first to begin it, and that those may obtain their revenge who are lawfully trying to inflict it.

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;

and they carried to it brush-wood, and stone, and soil, and whatever else would help to complete it when thrown on. Seventy days and nights continuously they were throwing it up, being divided into relief-parties, so that some should be carrying, while others were taking sleep and refreshment; the Lacedaemonian officers who shared the command over the contingents of each state urging them to the work.

But the Plataeans, seeing the mound rising, put together a wooden wall, and placed it on the wall of their city, where the mound was being made, and built bricks inside it, which they took from the neighbouring houses.