Pyrrhus

The men who were going to do the fighting the women ordered to keep quiet, and assuming their share of the task they completed with their own hands a third of the trench. The width of the trench was six cubits, its depth four, and its length eight hundred feet, according to Phylarchus; according to Hieronymus, less than this.

When day came and the enemy were putting themselves in motion, these women handed the young men their armour, put the trench in their charge, and told them to guard and defend it, assured that it was sweet to conquer before the eyes of their fatherland, and glorious to die in the arms of their mothers and wives, after a fall that was worthy of Sparta. As for Chilonis, she withdrew from the rest, and kept a halter about her neck, that she might not come into the power of Cleonymus if the city were taken.

Pyrrhus himself, then, with his men-at-arms, tried to force his way directly against the many shields of the Spartans which confronted him, and over a trench which was impassable and afforded his soldiers no firm footing owing to the freshly turned earth. But his son Ptolemy, with two thousand Gauls and picked Chaonians, went round the trench and tried to force a passage where the waggons were. These, however, being so deeply planted in the earth and so close together, made not only his onset, but also the counter-efforts of the Lacedaemonians, a difficult matter.