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;

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.

The timbers served as a frame for them, to prevent the building from being weak as it became high; and for curtains it had skins and hides, so that the workmen and the timbers were not exposed to fiery missiles, but were in safety.

So the wall was raised to a great height, and the mound rose opposite to it no less quickly. The Plataeans also adopted some such device as follows: they took down a part of the wall, where the mound lay against it, and carried the earth into the city.

The Peloponnesians, on perceiving this, rammed down clay in wattles of reed, and threw it into the breach, that it might not be loose, and so carried away like the soil.

Being thus baffled, the Plataeans ceased from this attempt; but having dug a passage under ground from the city, and having guessed their way under the mound, they began again to carry the soil in to them. And for a long time they escaped the observation of the enemy outside; so that though they continued to throw on materials, they were further from finishing it; as their mound was carried away from beneath, and continually sinking down into the vacuum.

Fearing, however, that they might not even by this means be able to hold out, so few in numbers against so many, they adopted the following additional contrivance. They ceased to work at the great building opposite to the mound; but beginning at either end of it, where the wall was of its original height, they built another in the form of a crescent, running inwards into the city; that if the great wall were taken, this might hold out, and their opponents might have to throw up a second mound against it, and as they advanced within, might have double trouble and be more exposed to missiles on both their flanks.