Mediterranean Hegemon of Ancient Greece Chapter 1228: Athens Surrenders (1)

Callistratus brought back Daionia's prerequisites for peace. When he read them aloud at the Ecclesia held on Pnyx Hill, it immediately sparked the citizens' fury. In the words of Isocrates, "The vicious Daionia is trying to destroy Athens!"

Filled with fighting spirit, the citizens reached a unanimous consensus: they would fight to the bitter end against the Daionians who sought to destroy Athens.

While the Athenians prepared for a full-scale defense, the two Daionian armies joined forces. Knowing his own limitations, Crotokatax took the initiative to yield unified military command to Patroclus.

Patroclus did not decline, nor did he launch an immediate assault on the city. Instead, he ordered the 100,000-strong army to construct fortified camps around Athens. (These 100,000 troops included not only the Daionian Army led by Crotokatax and Patroclus, but also the allied forces of Thebes, Mantineia, Argos, Corinth, Megara, and others.)

At the same time, he dispatched troops to sweep across the entire region of Attica. After capturing the towns and villages, the soldiers drove all the civilians who had not managed to flee right up to the walls of Athens before immediately pulling back.

As these people wailed outside the walls, the soldiers inside, seeing no immediate danger, promptly opened the gates to let them in.

Callistratus, Iphicrates, and the other leaders could not stop this. These refugees were Athenians—family and relatives of the citizens inside. Within a matter of days, the city had absorbed the entire population of Attica, swelling to nearly 300,000 people.

Even though Athens was the largest city on the Greek Mainland—covering over twenty square kilometers when including Port Piraeus—such a massive population placed an immense strain on its resources. Many fleeing Attican residents had nowhere to live, sleeping directly in the courtyards of public buildings and in the city squares. Makeshift hovels lined the roads all the way from Piraeus to the Acropolis of Athens. Naturally, maintaining sanitation became impossible. Excrement piled up everywhere with barely anyone to clean it. Given that it was still late September and temperatures remained high, flies and mosquitoes swarmed everywhere, choking the air with a foul stench.

For the generals, this was a minor issue; their main headache was food. Although they had stockpiled a large amount of provisions to organize an allied army against Daionia, the sheer population pressure stretched their supplies thin. Callistratus and the others had to spend considerable effort persuading the Council of 500 before organizing personnel to strictly control food consumption.

During this time, several Athenian doctors—who had frequently attended the Greek medical forums hosted by the Medical School of the Daonian Academy—jointly issued a warning to the government: they had to do everything possible to keep the city clean, or the filthy environment would inevitably spawn a plague.

Their advice caught the attention of the Executive Committee of Generals. After all, when the Peloponnesian War began and the Spartan Coalition attacked Athens by land, the city had mounted a similar urban defense. The situation back then had not been much different, yet it had not taken long for a massive plague to break out within the walls, eventually claiming the life of Pericles of Athens. Even though these doctors claimed their knowledge came entirely from the Daonian Medical School, the Athenian generals did not dismiss the warning. Over the years, the advanced medical expertise of Daionia had gradually gained recognition among several city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean. More importantly, the nightmare of the past plague remained far too terrifying. Thus, even though the medical knowledge originated from their mortal enemies, Callistratus and his colleagues decided to adopt the advice. They deployed a large workforce to clean the streets every day, doing their utmost to maintain the city's sanitation.

Before the battle even officially began, the Athenian leadership, spearheaded by Callistratus, was already physically and mentally exhausted by the explosive surge in administrative duties, while the populace struggled through each day in a state of tension, panic, and chaotic busyness.

Yet the Daionian Army still did not launch an assault. Instead, under Patroclus's orders, the Ballista units of the various legions spread evenly around Athens and began firing a barrage of small stone projectiles into the city. These stones constantly sailed over the walls, smashing nearby houses and inciting panic among the Athenian populace. This forced everyone away from the outer walls, which in turn caused even greater congestion in the center of the city.

To ensure the soldiers could access the walls without obstruction, Athenian officials had to assign slaves to clear the rubble left by the bombardment. Before long, secret reports began trickling into City Hall: "The household slaves have been sneaking out repeatedly to hold secret meetings with other slaves, acting very suspiciously."

City Hall immediately dispatched patrols to arrest and interrogate several slaves. The results were shocking. It turned out that the slaves tasked with clearing the rubble had discovered Greek words carved into almost every stone fired into the city. The core message was simple: "As long as the slaves dare to rise up against their masters and the city-state, and assist the Daionian Army in breaching the city, Daionia will not only grant them their freedom but also distribute land to them..."

With Athens's thriving culture and prosperous commerce, many slaves were not only literate but had also been trained by their masters as business assistants. Through their interactions with foreign merchants, they had learned a fair bit about how the Kingdom of Daunia in the west treated its slaves with relative leniency. Tempted by the prospect, some slaves had begun reaching out to one another in private. As a result, the news spread like wildfire among the slaves of Athens...

When the Executive Committee of Generals found out, they broke into a cold sweat. The slave population within Athens numbered over 100,000, nearly equal to the number of free citizens. Furthermore, their living conditions were not always better than those of Sparta's helots. For example, the mining slaves of the Laurion silver mines were not only vast in number but lived in abysmal conditions; many died in the pits every year. Naturally, these slaves harbored deep resentment toward the masters who exploited them, and mass uprisings had occurred numerous times. The most famous incident happened during the Peloponnesian War, when more than 40,000 Athenian slaves banded together and fled the city, dealing a severe blow to Athens's national strength.

During a previous military council, Iphicrates had even proposed an idea: organizing the young, strong male slaves and distributing weapons to them so they could help defend the city.

Although this suggestion had not been immediately approved, it had definitely tempted some and remained under active discussion. Now that this incident had occurred, the idea was naturally scrapped. Moreover, under the generals' direct orders, the city patrols immediately mobilized and arrested over a hundred slaves who had been sweeping the ruins earlier.

At the same time, the Council of 500 passed a resolution demanding that the city's populace keep a close eye on their household slaves and forbid them from going outside. Any abnormal behavior was to be reported to City Hall immediately. In addition, City Hall organized a unit of soldiers explicitly tasked with guarding the state-owned slaves.

Just as the Executive Committee of Generals was overwhelmed with these crises, another piece of bad news arrived: the main city built on the high grounds of Aegina Island had finally fallen, having put up a stubborn defense against several fierce assaults by the Daionian Army.

From then on, the Warships of Daionia's First Fleet and Third Fleet stationed themselves in the port of Aegina, the port of Isthmia in Corinth, and the port of Megara, respectively. This allowed them to lock down Athens's Port Piraeus airtight, twenty-four hours a day.

Meanwhile, on land, Patroclus issued another order: the soldiers who had finished building the camps were to begin constructing siege platforms just a hundred meters away from the city walls.

At the same time, he commanded the Engineering Brigade of every legion to build massive siege towers.

Once the orders were given, the 100,000 soldiers immediately set to work. The entire area outside Athens was transformed into a massive construction site, with dust billowing into the air every single day. Daionia's transport fleets also grew busy. They shipped the timber felled by the Messenians and Laconians from Mount Taygetus all the way to Megara. Pack caravans then carried the wood to the Davos Camp, where engineers directed craftsmen in assembling Siege Weapons. (Across the entirety of the Peloponnese and Central Greece, only the territory of Sparta—which placed little emphasis on seafaring—still possessed dense forests, and the trees on Mount Taygetus were exceptionally thick and tall.)

Standing atop the ten-meter-high walls of Athens, the Athenian Citizen Soldiers grew more anxious by the day. They watched as mounds of earth rose from the once-flat land outside the city, growing taller with each passing day until they threatened to surpass the height of the walls themselves.

Iphicrates did not settle for a passive defense. On several occasions, he led Thracian peltasts and Jason's mercenaries out of the city to launch surprise attacks. Initially, he achieved some success, killing and wounding a number of enemy soldiers. In one night raid, he even managed to breach the Megaran army's camp. However, fearing they would alert the main enemy forces, he had not brought many soldiers along, and the Daionian Army reinforced the position so swiftly that he was unable to expand his gains.

After this, however, the Daunian Allied Forces learned their lesson. Under Patroclus's strict demands, the various camps not only fortified their defenses but also improved their communication with one another. Furthermore, the Daionian soldiers connected the earthen trenches in front of each siege platform—created from excavating dirt for the platforms—and expanded them into a continuous moat. This made it incredibly difficult for the Athenian army to even launch a raid on the construction sites. Thus, after suffering casualties in a few more failed sorties, Iphicrates was forced to temporarily halt these risky maneuvers.

Consequently, the Daionian soldiers vastly accelerated their construction speed. Eventually, a series of siege platforms, each over ten meters tall, loomed just outside Athens. The Athenian soldiers gazed up at these earthen mounds that dwarfed their own walls, gripped by terror. But what terrified them even more was the constant barrage of stone projectiles howling down from these heights, sailing over the ramparts, and crashing into the city proper.