Mediterranean Hegemon of Ancient Greece Chapter 1217: Pharsalus Surrenders

Polydorus had been a mild, steady man who treated his soldiers with kindness. The citizen soldiers respected him as their commander, and his bizarre death immediately aroused their suspicions. Furthermore, Archidamas and the other five ministers were highly reputable figures from the major city-states of Thessaly. Jason had specifically handpicked them as his capable assistants to help integrate the region, yet Polyphron had executed them on trumped-up charges. How could the citizen soldiers from those city-states not be furious? They only held back their anger out of fear of Polyphron's despotic cruelty.

When the Daionian Army's swift and ferocious assault turned the tide against them, the demoralized Thessalian forces quickly abandoned the fight and fled. In the ensuing chaos, a few citizen soldiers from Pherae—enraged by Polyphron's recent actions—turned their blades on him, killing the tyrant as he tried to escape.

With the entire Thessalian army routed, all discipline collapsed. The soldiers scattered in every direction, desperate to flee back to their home city-states. The region was soon swarming with stragglers, which made it difficult for the Daionian Army to mount a focused pursuit.

Neither Matonis nor Lizarus had expected the Thessalian army to collapse so rapidly, but both instantly realized what this victory meant: they could now rapidly seize Pherae, whose defenses were likely stripped bare. This would permanently resolve the Daionian Army's food supply crisis, which had been the primary goal of their eastward march. Thus, the two commanders ordered their cavalry legions, along with the light infantry and light-armored cohorts who had expended little energy in the battle, to ignore the fleeing stragglers and race straight for Pherae.

While Matonis and Lizarus engaged the Thessalian army on the northern plains, Patroclus had already led his own forces over the mountains and down into the equally flat southern plains of Thessaly. Ignoring their exhaustion, his soldiers pressed on toward the northeastern hills. By afternoon, they approached the heart of the southern plains: Pharsalus.

The citizens of Pharsalus were somewhat prepared for the Daionian Army's arrival, as Lamia had previously sent messengers begging them for aid when the enemy fleet first landed in the Maliac Gulf. Pharsalus had even dispatched its own rider to Pherae to request reinforcements. By the time that messenger arrived, however, Polyphron had already marched his army toward Larissa. Instead of help, the rider only discovered that Archidamas—a man deeply respected by the people of Pharsalus—had been executed. The messenger had not yet managed to bring this grim news back to his home city.

The people of Pharsalus never expected the Daionian forces to arrive so quickly, nor in such overwhelming numbers. As the citizen soldiers peered down from their walls, all they could see was a terrifying, boundless tide of black armor surging across the earth.

Pharsalus was fortified atop a steep hill and had already prepared its defenses. Given the late hour and his men's exhaustion from their long march, Patroclus ordered the army to pitch camp and rest less than a li from the city walls. Encamping so close made them an easy target for a night raid, but with his absolute superiority in numbers, Patroclus was not worried. In fact, he welcomed an attack.

But just as the soldiers began digging trenches and building the camp, his scout cavalry returned with an unexpected report: a massive throng of routed Thessalian soldiers had appeared to the north.

Having fled for hours, these Thessalian stragglers thought they had finally escaped the Daionian pursuit, only to crash headlong into another massive Daionian army. It was a devastating blow to the exhausted men, and many of them simply threw down their weapons and surrendered on the spot.

Before dusk, the hunt was nearly over. The Daionian forces captured over two thousand Thessalian stragglers, the vast majority of whom hailed from Pharsalus.

Interrogating the prisoners gave Patroclus a rough picture of Matonis and Lizarus's movements in the north over the past few days. He was thrilled by their back-to-back victories—capturing Peleus and Larissa before crushing the main Thessalian army. However, the news also served as a stark reminder to accelerate his own campaign. He needed to avoid losing prestige from a lack of military achievements by the time the two armies reunited, even though he was the one who had volunteered to land on the far more difficult southern coast.

In response, Patroclus selected five high-status, reputable prisoners from among the captured Pharsalus soldiers. First, he assembled his forces and made the captives walk beside him as he inspected tens of thousands of his highly motivated soldiers. Then, he brought over his Lamian guides to explain the harsh reality: the Daionian Army had already occupied Lamia, Heraclea, and Thermopylae to the south.

Only after this display did Patroclus sit down for formal talks. He laid it out clearly: Daionia had dispatched an army of a hundred thousand men to invade Thessaly. With the bulk of their own forces far away in the Peloponnese, the city-states of Thessaly stood no chance of resisting. However, if Pharsalus surrendered to Daionia, he would swear in the name of Hades, protector of the Kingdom of Daunia, that his army would not harm the citizens or plunder their property. But if Pharsalus refused to surrender before dawn, he would execute all two thousand of their captive kinsmen, launch a full assault on the city, and enslave every single survivor within its walls.

Having delivered his ultimatum, Patroclus released the five captives, sending them into Pharsalus as his messengers.

The captives rushed straight to the council chamber of Pharsalus, relaying the Theonians' demands to the officials who had not yet departed. They also recounted everything that had transpired across Thessaly over the past few days.

The council members were horrified by the report. The Theonians had supposedly sent a hundred thousand troops to conquer Thessaly. (Though the captives swore this was true based on the staggering enemy numbers they had seen across both the northern and southern plains, the council remained slightly skeptical of such a massive figure.) The enemy had already captured Peleus, Larissa, Lamia, Heraclea, and Thermopylae—a claim they found much harder to doubt. On the side of the Thessalian League, not only had their interim commander Polydorus been assassinated, but the only remaining defense force in the region had just been slaughtered in a pitched battle. Worst of all, to the absolute outrage of Pharsalus, their pillar of leadership—the highly respected Archidamas—had been executed by Polyphron as a traitor.

The Daionian invasion was an unstoppable tide, and the House of Jason could no longer be trusted. What path was left for Pharsalus?

At dusk, bells echoed wildly throughout the city. The officials urgently convened an ecclesia. Despite Pharsalus being one of the preeminent powers in Thessaly, fewer than two thousand citizens attended the assembly, and barely five hundred of them were young, able-bodied men. The vast majority of their citizens were either Daionian captives or fighting far away in Jason's army.

The sheer size of the Daionian host camped outside their walls had already shattered their courage. Now, learning that the enemy was even stronger than they had feared, and that their city was utterly isolated without hope of reinforcement, the overwhelming majority of the citizens agreed to surrender.

The ecclesia swiftly passed the resolution. They publicly declared that their surrender was motivated by a desire to save the lives of their captive kinsmen and to spare Pharsalus from annihilation. After all, the tragic fate of Tegea—which had betrayed its treaty and been utterly wiped off the map by Daionia, left as an empty ruin—had been heavily circulated throughout Greece by those with ulterior motives. Pharsalus had no desire to repeat their mistake.

That very night, Pharsalus dispatched envoys out of the city to negotiate the terms of surrender with the Daionian Army.

Among the powerful city-states of Thessaly, Pherae was quite unique. Surrounded by rugged, rolling hills, its natural terrain strictly limited the size of its urban area, and its territory lacked flat, fertile farmland. Its vast wealth stemmed entirely from maritime trade. Ever since Jason became the tyrant of Pherae, he had aggressively expanded the harbor. As a result, the Port District had grown so massive that it accounted for nearly half the city's total area, making it almost impossible to completely wall it off from the main residential districts.

A dozen cargo ships were moored at one of the harbor's docks. A portly middle-aged man staggered toward them, belching loudly and drunkenly hailing the captains of the nearby merchant vessels. It was only when he reached the innermost ship of the cluster that he finally stopped. He slumped forward as if on the verge of collapsing in a drunken stupor, but secretly used the posture to sweep his eyes over his surroundings. Seeing nothing suspicious, he stumbled clumsily onto the deck and wobbled down into the ship's cabin.

Unlike the snoring sailors sprawled haphazardly across the deck above, the three men sitting inside the cramped cabin were wide awake, discussing something in hushed tones.

"Commander, I'm back!" the supposedly drunken sailor whispered.

The man addressed as commander looked to be around forty years old. He possessed an exceptionally burly frame adorned with several striking scars across his face and body. Every movement he made radiated a terrifying aura. He was none other than the current commander of the Mountain Reconnaissance Brigade of the Sacred Kingdom of Daunia: Tegetus.

Tegetus was supposed to be fighting alongside Crotokatax in the Peloponnese. Why had he appeared in the port of Pherae?

As it turned out, the Mountain Reconnaissance Brigade had always been a crucial component of the Ministry of Military Affairs' plan for the amphibious assault on Thessaly. Because the landing forces needed to conquer the region as swiftly as possible to relieve their severe food shortages, capturing Pherae—the center of Thessaly—was their utmost priority. Infiltrating a small detachment ahead of time to establish inner and outer coordination with the main army was a staple tactic the Daionian Army had used to breach cities in countless past wars. Since the Mountain Reconnaissance Brigade specialized in precisely this kind of infiltration strategy and had earned numerous merits executing it, they had been handpicked for the mission to infiltrate Pherae.