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76-507: Plataea ( / p l ə ˈ t iː ə / ; Ancient Greek : Πλάταια , Plátaia ) was an ancient Greek city-state situated in Boeotia near the frontier with Attica at the foot of Mt. Cithaeron, between the mountain and the river Asopus , which divided its territory from that of Thebes . Its inhabitants were known as the Plataeans ( Πλαταιαί ; Plataiaí , Latin : Plataeae ). It

152-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

228-811: A Peloponnesian force against Plataea and began to raze their crops. The Plataeans, in response, dispatched a herald reminding the Spartans of the glorious deeds the Plataeans performed during the Greco-Persian War and of the oath the Spartans swore to protect them and keep them independent and reminding the Spartans that in 479 BC, Pausanias, the Spartan general, had decreed that Plataea was on holy ground and it should never be attacked. The Spartans responded by demanding Plataean neutrality in return for their protection. After consulting Athens, Plataea rejected

304-405: A dark, stormy night, and implemented the plan. Catching the guards by surprise, 212 men managed to evade capture. Thucydides writes, "it was mainly the violence of the storm that enabled them to effect their escape at all." The remaining Plataeans finally surrendered to the Spartans in the summer of the next year, as all supplies they had were exhausted and no hope of help remained. They had trusted

380-455: A desperate situation. They were besieged by the Spartans and Boeotians and were uncertain whether any Athenian help would arrive. Their stores were running dangerously low, and so a desperate plan was developed to try and salvage their position. The plan involved breaking past the Spartan defences and escape; originally all the men were to join the attempt, but the danger being so great, only 220 ultimately agreed to go. They accordingly waited for

456-477: A lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and

532-419: A lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in

608-537: A mark of favour from the Athenian people". Aristophanes , in his Frogs (693-4) has the Chorus opine, "For it is disgraceful for men who have fought one battle by sea to become Plataeans straightway and masters instead of slaves". A scholiast to this passage appended this: " Hellanicus says that the slaves who joined in the sea battle were given their freedom and were enrolled as joint-citizens ( sympoliteysasthai ) with

684-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

760-608: A separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek

836-635: A series of incursions into Boeotia to ravage the Theban countryside. After several years of this, the Thebans, sometimes with Athenian help, began to get the upper hand in these encounters. In 375 BC Sparta was too busy with other campaigns to send forces to the area and Thebes took the opportunity to compel these cities back into the Boeotian Federation .  Though not under assault, the Plataeans had lost their independence once more. Over

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912-432: A special relationship between Plataeans and Athenians, though the exact nature of it is disputed by scholars. Thucydides had the Thebans say in a speech: "It was in defense against us, say you, that you became allies and citizens ( politai ) of Athens." Diodorus Siculus, in describing a later event, says: "The Plataeans with their wives and children, having fled to Athens, received equality of civic rights ( isopoliteia ) as

988-630: A standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as

1064-578: A statue. It was situated outside the city. Plataea is featured in the 2nd-century AD Latin novel Metamorphoses (often called The Golden Ass ) by Apuleius, in which it is depicted as hosting gladiatorial combat and an array of wild beasts. Plataea's walls were restored by Justinian in the 6th century AD. The modern village of Plataies is adjacent to the ancient ruins.  Foundation stones for several of its buildings are still extant.  More information can be found at https://eternalgreece.com/ancient-plataea/ There are several references to

1140-492: A stormy moonless night into Plataea by two private citizens who expected the Theban force to immediately capture and kill the democratic leaders and bring Plataea into alliance with Thebes. Instead the Theban commanders harmed no one but attempted to persuade all of the citizens of Plataea to join with Thebes' allies. The democratic leadership accepted the offer but quickly worked out that the invading force could be overpowered because of their small numbers, their lack of knowledge of

1216-483: A temple was erected at Plataea. In return for these services the assembled Greeks swore to guarantee the independence and inviolability of the city and its territory. Plataea was rebuilt and its inhabitants were unmolested until the commencement of the Peloponnesian War . In the spring of 431 BC, before war was formally declared, a party of 300 Thebans attempted to take over Plataea. They were admitted within

1292-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

1368-570: Is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in the epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of

1444-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

1520-666: Is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to

1596-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

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1672-556: Is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ), the Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been

1748-431: Is probable that the old temple of Hera mentioned by Herodotus, and which he described as outside the city, was no longer repaired after the erection of the new one, and had disappeared before Pausanias' visit. The temple of Athena Areia was built, according to Pausanias, out of a share of the spoils of Marathon; but according to Plutarch it was with the 80 talents out of the spoils of Plataea, as mentioned above. The temple

1824-759: The Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as the Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

1900-630: The Spartans had an ulterior motive in this: that they wished to cause trouble between Athens and Thebes.  In the end, Plataea did form a close alliance with Athens, to which its people remained faithful during the whole of its subsequent history. When the Persian king Dareios sent an armada to invade Attica in 490 BC, Plataea sent 1,000 men to join Athens at the Battle of Marathon , and shared in

1976-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

2052-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

2128-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

2204-591: The Athenians on the same terms as the Plataeans". Perhaps the fullest explanation of their status came from Demosthenes in Against Neaera .  During this oration, he had the clerk read out a previously enacted degree regarding the Plataeans that had been passed during their exile in 429 BC: On motion of Hippocrates it is decreed that the Plataeans shall be Athenians from this day, and shall have full rights as citizens, and that they shall share in all

2280-567: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   Siege of Plataea According to Thucydides , an armed force of 300 Thebans commanded by two leading Theban generals were admitted after dark on

2356-428: The Plataeans remained in exile at Athens. In 338 BC the simmering war between Athens and Macedon came to a head when Philip brought his army into southern Greece.  At the last minute Thebes, which had been in league with Macedon for years, switched sides and fought with Athens against him and his son Alexander at Chaeroneia , in northern Boeotia.  The result was a resounding victory for Macedon.  Among

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2432-457: The Plataeans secured a truce, during which they sent their old men, women, and children to Athens together with the envoys who were to see what Athens had to say.  In the end, they determined to continue the alliance, which set the stage for the assault that came next.  The remaining garrison of the city consisted of only 400 citizens and 80 Athenians, and 110 women who were there to manage household affairs.  Yet this small force defied

2508-545: The Plataeans: of the rest of the materials in the wall, the brass and the iron, they made couches which they dedicated to Hera, for whom they also built a stone chapel of a hundred feet square. The choice of Hera as the goddess glorified at the expense of the dispossessed Plataeans might have been motivated by Hera's alleged jealousy of Zeus' giving birth to Athena , patron goddess of Athens, without recourse to her. The conspicuous worship of Hera at Plataea continued long past

2584-463: The Spartan proposal and began in earnest to prepare their defences. The Spartans then quickly laid siege to the city, and employed several innovative, yet unsuccessful tactics to bypass the Plataean defences. Failing in these undertakings, the Spartans built a line of fortifications around the city, left enough troops to guard the walls, then retired. The winter of the next year found the Plataeans in

2660-479: The Spartans to a fair trial, as the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) had promised to "judge them all fairly", and that "only the guilty should be punished" if they yielded. Yet, when the Plataean prisoners were brought before the judges, no trial was held; no chance for apology was offered. The Spartans simply asked each of the prisoners if they had done the Lacedaemonians and allies any service in the war, to which

2736-461: The Thebans expelled the Plataeans rather than killing them - sending them once again to Athens, after which they razed the city. They next did the same to neighboring Thespiae. (The wrongs done to the Plataeans by Thebes were set forth in a speech of Isocrates, entitled Plataicus , which was probably delivered at this time by a Plataean speaker before the Assembly at Athens. At any rate, it

2812-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

2888-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

2964-559: The beginning of the Peloponnesian War, which would go on for another 27 years. He says that "the treaty had now been broken by an overt act after the affair at Plataea" and that "Athens and Lacedaemon now resolved to send embassies to the King and to such other of the barbarian powers as either party could look to for assistance." During the summer, two years after these events occurred, the Spartan king Archidamus II finally led

3040-572: The besieged succeeded in scaling the walls of circumvallation during the night and safely made it to Athens. In the course of the following summer (427), those remaining in Plataea were obliged, through failure of provisions, to surrender to the Peloponnesians.  After a "trial" by the Spartans, in which their arguments against the unwarranted assault on the city were shunted aside, they were put to death and all private buildings were razed to

3116-438: The center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West

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3192-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

3268-498: The end of the war. In later times the temple was renowned for a sculpture by Callimachus of Hera seated as a bride, as well as a sculpture of a matronly Hera in a standing position. Thebes occupied the site of Plataea until 387 BC. Athens harbored the city's survivors. The Thebans were on the losing side in the Corinthian War and the 387 Peace of Antalcidas required Thebes disband its Boeotian League. This made possible

3344-475: The following year (479 BC), their territory was the scene of the Battle of Plataea , which delivered Greece from the Persian invaders. In this engagement, a combined Greek force met those of the Persian general Mardonius on the plain next to the Asopus River.  As this victory had been gained on the soil of Plataea, its citizens received special honour and rewards from the confederated Greeks. Not only

3420-459: The geographer Pausanias , was that its people were "sprung from the soil" (autochthonous, or indigenous).  Its name is that of the daughter of an ancient king, Asopus , for whom the nearby river is named. According to the ancient Thebans, who claimed authority over the city, Plataea was founded by them. In 520 BC Plataea, unwilling to submit to the supremacy of Thebes, and unable to resist this powerful neighbour with its own resources, sought

3496-428: The gift from the people of Athens. If this is a true representation of the decree (and its wording has been challenged in modern times), it would seem that the status did not apply to all Plataeans forever, but only to those individuals who were specifically honored and their children.  Based on the several references to separate grants of citizenship, it is probable that these honors were bestowed multiple times over

3572-456: The glories of that victory. A decade later, they also served in the Athenian fleet at the sea battle at Artemisium , though they had no ships of their own.  They missed the later Battle of Salamis , in order to remove their families and property from the city at the approach of the Persian army. Upon the arrival of the Persians shortly afterwards their city was burned to the ground. In

3648-486: The ground by the Thebans.  In time, the latter used the remnants to erected an inn and a chapel for the local precinct of Hera.  The land was allocated to those Plataeans who had supported Thebes in the lead-up to the attack. In 423 BC, Athens and Sparta negotiated a one-year truce in the midst of the Pelopennesian War.  One of the terms was that no new conquests or revolts were to take place once

3724-561: The historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from

3800-476: The historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at the time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to

3876-516: The invaders tried to escape by jumping off the city wall, but most of these were killed in the fall. Others entered a large open building, mistaking it for an exit from the town. The Plataeans locked the building and held them there for a short time before killing them all. A second larger Theban force was supposed to reinforce the invading force, but the weather and the flooding of the Asopos river delayed them. The Plataeans, to forestall any attempt by

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3952-415: The next couple of years, the Plataeans increasingly resented Thebes' heavy hand. At some point – the year is reported variously as 373, 372, and 371 BC by ancient sources – they reached out to Athens in an attempt to restore the long-standing alliance between the two cities. This, of course, incensed the Thebans and they attacked the Plataea before Athens could respond. Unlike the attack in 427 BC, this time

4028-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

4104-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

4180-506: The power of Thebes, took advantage of it to restore the Plataeans to their native city. But the Plataeans did not long retain possession of their city. With Thebes ever a threat to their independence, Sparta kept a garrison there to protect it, and at the Boeotian cities of Thespiae and Orchomenus as well.  In the 370s, Athens and Thebes went to war against Sparta, and the Lacedaemonians used Thespiae and Plataea as staging areas for

4256-399: The prisoners, after a heated debate, ultimately had to answer "no". Thus, the Spartans killed over 200 of the Plataean defenders "among which were 25 Athenians" according to Thucydides. The Thebans ultimately razed the entire town, and built on to the precinct of Hera an inn two hundred feet square, with rooms all round above and below, making use for this purpose of the roofs and doors of

4332-446: The privileges in which the Athenians share, both civil and religious, save any priesthood or religious office which belongs to a particular family, and that they shall not be eligible to the office of the nine archons but their descendants shall be. And the Plataeans shall be distributed among the demes and the tribes; and after they have been so distributed, it shall no longer be lawful for any Plataean to become an Athenian, unless he wins

4408-403: The protection of Sparta .  Sparta, however, demurred, saying: We live too far away, and our help would be cold comfort to you. You could be enslaved many times over before any of us heard about it. We advise you to put yourselves under the protection of the Athenians, since they are your neighbours and not bad men at giving help. Herodotos , the source of this statement, went on to say that

4484-497: The rebuilding of Plataea in 386. However, with the resurgence of Thebes and the creation of the Theban hegemony by Epaminondas , the Thebans destroyed Plataea again in 373. In 338 BC, after Philip II of Macedon defeated the Thebans at the Battle of Chaeronea , he reestablished Plataea as "a symbol of Greek courage in resisting the Persians". His son, Alexander the Great in 335 altogether destroyed Thebes , whereupon its territory

4560-412: The second force to capture Plataeans who lived outside the walls, agreed to let their Theban prisoners live if the Thebans did no further harm. Each side alleged later that the other had taken an oath to the agreement and then broke it, a potentially serious issue in the propaganda war that would impact on future relations between the two sides. After the invaders had entered the town, a Plataean messenger

4636-486: The settlements later imposed by Philip on the Greek cities, the Plataeans were restored to their city once more. In 335 BC, Thebes revolted against Alexander, who had succeeded his father the previous year.  In response, Alexander destroyed the city, sending the Theban survivors into slavery.  With their would-be overlords out of the picture, the Plataeans were finally free. After its restoration by Philip, Plataea continued to be inhabited for several centuries. It

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4712-528: The spark that ignited the war between Athens and Sparta. In the third year of the war (429 BC) the Peloponnesian army under the command of Spartan king Archidamus laid siege to Plataea , claiming that it had violated the protections guaranteed it after the Persian War by continuing its alliance with Athens. Before deciding whether to declare the city neutral or maintain their alliance with Athens,

4788-413: The streets, the bad weather, and the darkness. The enraged citizenry then attacked them. In one of the rare instances in which both women and slaves took part in what amounted to warfare, the citizenry killed over half the 300 Thebans. Thucydides reports that a number of the remaining Thebans escaped with the help of a Plataean woman who provided them with an axe to break open one of the town's gates. Some of

4864-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

4940-533: The truce was signed.  The people of Scione , in the Chalcidice , had revolted about this time, and while Sparta claimed it was before the truce, Athens had intelligence that it took place afterward.  The Athenian assembly then passed a decree "to reduce and put to death the Scionaeans".  The next year they besieged the city, finally subduing it and carrying out the decree in 420.  Once this

5016-443: The walls during the night by members of a faction partial to Thebes, but the Plataeans soon discovered the attack and engaged the invaders.  During the night they killed many and captured 180. Few escaped. Word was sent to Athens of the attempted coup, and then the captives were executed.  The Athenians, dismayed at the slaughter, nevertheless sent a garrison to protect the city from further attack.  This event proved to be

5092-415: The whole army of the Peloponnesians, which, after many fruitless attempts to take the city, gave up the assault and converted the siege into a blockade.  They raised a circumvallation round the city consisting of two parallel walls, 16 feet apart, with a ditch on either side.  Then, leaving a small force to guard the city, the invading army went home. In the second year of the blockade (428), 212 of

5168-408: The years to succeeding generations of Plataean exiles. 38°13′12″N 23°16′26″E  /  38.219992°N 23.273853°E  / 38.219992; 23.273853 Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It

5244-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

5320-404: Was adorned with pictures by Polygnotus and Onatas , and with a statue of the goddess by the Athenian sculptor Pheidias . Of the temple of Demeter Eleusinia we have no details, but it was probably erected in consequence of the battle having been fought near a temple of Demeter Eleusinia at Argiopius. The temple of Zeus Eleutherius seems to have been reduced in the time of Pausanias to an altar and

5396-522: Was done, they gave the town to those Plataeans then living at Athens to be their new home. At the close of the Peloponnesian War, Athens was compelled to evacuate Scione, and the Plataeans again found a hospitable welcome at Athens. The exiled Plataeans continued to live at Athens until the imposition Peace of Antalcidas by the Great King of Persia (387 BC), which guaranteed the autonomy of all Greek cities. The Spartans, who were now anxious to humble

5472-536: Was later published and preserved among Isocrates works.) As a result of these actions, Athens backed out of its alliance with Thebes and sought peace with Sparta. In 371 BC, Sparta lost a major battle to Thebes at Leuktra , in Boeotia.  For the next two decades Thebes reigned supreme in Greece, until the rise of Macedon and the campaign of Philip II to extend its hegemony throughout the region. During this time,

5548-591: Was sent to Athens to alert them to what was happening. A second messenger later that night updated the Athenians on the outcome. The Athenians sent a messenger back to Plataea instructing them not to kill the prisoners, but he arrived too late. The Plataeans had already killed them all. The Athenians also sent a force to relieve Plataea. Women, children, and men too old or otherwise unfit for military service were evacuated to Attica. Thucydides states (Book II.1–6) that these events, during which Thebes and its Boeotian allies lost over 10 per cent of their total army, represented

5624-545: Was the large sum of 80 talents granted to them, which they employed in erecting a temple to Athena, but they were charged with the duty of tendering religious honours every year to the tombs of the warriors who had fallen in the battle, and of celebrating every four years the festival of the Eleutheria in commemoration of the deliverance of the Greeks from the Persian yoke. The festival was sacred to Zeus Eleutherius , to whom

5700-615: Was the location of the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC, in which an alliance of Greek city-states defeated the Persians . Plataea was destroyed and rebuilt several times during the Classical period of ancient Greece. The modern Greek town of Plataies is adjacent to its ruins. Plataea was settled during the Bronze Age . (It was mentioned in Homer in the Iliad as among the other Boeotian cities).  Local tradition, as related by

5776-420: Was visited by Pausanias in the 2nd century AD, who mentioned three temples, one of Hera , another of Athena Areia , and a third of Demeter Eleusinia. He wrote of only one temple of Hera, which he described as situated within the city and worthy of admiration because of its magnitude and the offerings with which it was adorned. This was possibly the temple built by the Thebans after the destruction of Plataea. It

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