ancient greece mediterranean ruler

Chapter 1228 Athens surrenders ([-])

Callistratus brought back the prerequisites for Dionia's agreement to peace, and read them out at the citizens' assembly held on Mount Prix, which immediately aroused the anger of the citizens. According to Isocrates, "the evil Dionia wants to destroy Athens!".

So the citizens were full of fighting spirit and agreed unanimously: to fight to the death with the Dionians who were about to destroy Athens.

The Athenians were ready for a comprehensive defense, and after the two Dionysian armies joined forces, the self-aware Clotocathax took the initiative to give up unified military command to Patroclus.

Patroclus did not refuse, but he did not immediately attack the city of Athens. Instead, he ordered the 10 troops to build a strong camp around the city of Athens (the 10 troops not only included Clotokattakes and Patriarch The Dionian army led by Troclus, as well as allied armies such as Thebes, Mandinia, Argos, Corinth, and Megara).

At the same time, he also dispatched troops to sweep across the entire Attica region. After capturing the villages and towns, he drove all the people in the villages and towns who failed to escape into the city of Athens in time to the city of Athens, and the army immediately left.

These people were wailing outside the city. Seeing that there was no danger, the soldiers inside the city immediately opened the city gate and let them in.

Callistratus, Iphicrates and others could not stop them at all, because these people were all Athenians and relatives or relatives of the citizens in the city, so within a few days the city of Athens accommodated the entire Atti The population of the Ka area has reached nearly 30.

Although Athens is the largest city in mainland Greece, and with the port of Piraeus, the entire city area exceeds 20 square kilometers, such a huge population still puts great pressure on the entire city to survive: many people fled into The residents of Attica in the city have no place to live, so they sleep directly in the courtyards and squares of public buildings. Even the roads from Piraeus to the Acropolis can be seen everywhere with temporary shacks built by the people. The place is clean and tidy, there are excrement everywhere, and few people clean it up, and it is still the end of September, the temperature is still high, flies and mosquitoes are flying everywhere, and the stench is suffocating.

For the generals, this is still a small problem. The main headache for them is food.Although a lot of food was stored in the city in advance in order to organize the coalition forces to fight against Dionia, it still felt tight in the face of such huge population pressure.Callistratus and others had to spend a lot of words to convince the 500-person parliament, and then organized manpower to strictly control food consumption.

In addition, drinking water is also an issue.There were originally several rivers in the Athens area, but they were all outside the city and under the control of the Dionian army. Therefore, the people in the city could only rely on the wells in the city. Residents in the city and refugees outside the city often competed for the wells. There were disputes and even conflicts over usage rights, and the Athenian government had to send additional manpower to maintain the order of water intake from each well.

During this period, several Athenian doctors who had participated in several Greek medical forums organized by the Dionysian Academy of Medicine jointly warned the Athens government: They must try their best to ensure the cleanliness of the city, otherwise the too dirty environment will caused the plague.

Their suggestions attracted the attention of the General Executive Committee. You must know that after the Peloponnesian War began, the Spartan coalition attacked Athens from overland. At that time, Athens also defended itself from the city. The situation was not much different from today, but it did not Not long after, a great plague broke out in the city, and Pericles also fell ill and died.Although these doctors claimed that "the knowledge they learned was learned from the Dionysian Medical College", the Athenian generals did not ignore it. After all, the high medical level of Dionysius has gradually been achieved over the years. Some city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean agreed, and the nightmare caused by the plague to the Athenians was too terrible, so even though they were enemies, Callistratus and others still decided to adopt their suggestions and sent a large number of people to clean the streets every day. Try your best to keep the city clean.

Before the formal war began, the top officials of Athens, headed by Callistratus, were already exhausted mentally and physically due to the surge in administrative matters in the city, and the people were also struggling to spend every day in tension, panic, and busyness.

However, the Dionysian army still did not launch an attack. Only the ballistae teams of each legion, under the order of Patroclus, were evenly distributed around the city of Athens and began to fire a large number of small stone bullets into the city of Athens. These stone bullets They continued to cross the city wall and smashed nearby houses, causing panic among the Athenian people and forcing them to stay away from the city wall, which also caused crowding in the center of the city.

In order to ensure that soldiers could go up and down the city wall without hindrance, Athenian officials had to arrange for slaves to clean up the ruins caused by stone bombardment near the city wall. Soon, people kept reporting to the city hall, saying that "the slaves at home have repeatedly Go out quietly, meet with other slaves in secret, and move surreptitiously."

The city hall immediately dispatched a patrol team to arrest some slaves for interrogation. The results were surprising. It turned out that those slaves who were responsible for cleaning up the ruins near the city wall found that almost all the stone bullets shot into the city were engraved with Greek characters, which mainly meant "as long as slaves dare to Rise up against their masters and city-states, and assist the Dionia army to break through the city. Dionia will not only give them freedom, but even give them land..."

Athens had a prosperous culture and developed commerce. Many slaves were not only literate, but were also trained by their masters to become their assistants in business. Moreover, in their interactions with foreign merchants, they knew something about "the treatment of slaves in the Kingdom of Dionia in the west." Tolerance" matter, so some slaves were tempted and began to contact and discuss privately. As a result, the news quickly spread among the slaves in Athens...

When the general’s executive committee found out, they were all in a cold sweat, because the population of slaves in Athens was as high as more than 10, which was almost the same as the number of people in Athens, and the living conditions of the slaves in Athens were not all better than those of Helotus in Sparta. For example, Not only are there a large number of mining slaves in the Laoliang Silver Mine, but their lives are extremely poor. Many slaves die in the mine every year... These slaves are of course full of resentment towards the slave owners who exploited them, and there have been many incidents of groups rebelling against their masters event.The most famous one is that during the Peloponnesian War, more than 4 Athenian slaves united and escaped from the city of Athens, which caused a major blow to the national strength of Athens.

At the previous military meeting, Ifkrates also made a suggestion: organize young and strong male slaves, distribute weapons, and assist in defending the city.

Although this suggestion was not approved immediately, it did move some people, so it has been under discussion. But now that something like this has happened, naturally it will not be considered again.And under their orders, the city patrol immediately took action and arrested hundreds of slaves who had been cleaning the ruins.

At the same time, the 500-person assembly passed a resolution requiring the people in the city to keep an eye on their own slaves, prohibit them from going out, and report any abnormalities to the city hall immediately.The city hall also organized a group of soldiers to take care of the city-state slaves.

Just when the General Executive Committee was extremely busy, another piece of bad news came: the main city built on the heights of Aegina Island finally fell after tenaciously defending against several storming attacks by the Dionian army.

Since then, the warships of Dionia's First Fleet and Third Fleet have been stationed at the Port of Aegina, the Port of Ismia in Corinth, and the Port of Megara, so that Piraeus in Athens can be transported 24 hours a day. The port blockade is airtight.

On land, Patroclus issued an order: Let the soldiers who had built the camp start building a siege platform a hundred meters away from the city.

At the same time, an order was issued: Let each legion engineering battalion build super siege towers.

After the order was issued, one hundred thousand soldiers immediately began to be busy. The surrounding area outside the city of Athens turned into construction sites, and dust was flying every day.The transport fleet in Dionysia was also busy. They transported the trees cut down by Messenians and Laconia from Mount Taygetos to Megara, and then transported them to Dionysia by pack teams. Sub-camp, and then engineers led craftsmen to manufacture siege equipment (in the entire Peloponnese and Central Greece, only Sparta, which did not pay attention to navigation, still had dense forests, and the trees on Mount Taygetos They are all extremely strong and tall).

Standing on the top of the 10-meter-high Athens city, the Athenian citizen soldiers became more and more nervous day by day, because they saw mounds rising up on the originally flat land outside the city, and they were getting taller day by day, almost surpassing the Athens city wall. .

Iphicrates did not have a passive defense. He led Thracian light shields and Jason's mercenaries out of the city several times to conduct raids. At first, he achieved some results, killing some enemy soldiers, and even once The camp of the Megara army was breached in the night attack, but due to fear of alerting the enemy, not many soldiers participated in the night attack, and the Dionian army was reinforced in time and failed to expand the results.

But after that, the Dionian coalition learned its lesson. Under the strict requirements of Patroclus, the various military camps not only strengthened their defenses, but also strengthened their connections with each other, and the Dionian soldiers also The trenches in front of each siege platform (formed by digging the earth to build the siege platform) were connected and expanded into trenches, making it difficult for the Athenian army to even raid the construction site.Therefore, after several raids in which he lost his troops and generals, Iphicrates had to temporarily stop this risky approach.

Therefore, the construction speed of the Dionian soldiers was greatly accelerated, and finally siege platforms more than 10 meters high towered outside the city of Athens. The Athenian soldiers looked up at these mounds that were higher than the city wall, and they all felt panic.But what frightened them even more was that stone bullets roared from these mounds, crossed the city walls, and landed in the city of Athens.

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(End of this chapter)