Guide to Greece: Central Greece by Pausanias

Author:Pausanias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, Greece, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Literary Collections, Ancient & Classical
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2004-12-02T05:23:08+00:00

This was the inscription in the days before Sulla’s men took away the shields from the colonnade of Zeus of Freedom among the loot of Athens. [4] And now at Thermopylai after the battle the Greeks buried their dead and stripped the barbarians, but the Gauls sent no herald for the taking up of their dead, not caring whether they were buried or fed wild animals and the birds who make war on corpses. This neglect of giving graves to those who had passed away was for two reasons I think: to astound their enemies, and because they have no natural pity for the dead. Forty Greeks died in the battle, but it was impossible to discover the exact number of barbarians, since a large number of them vanished into the mud.

[22] [1] A week after the battle a commando of Gauls tried to get up on to Mount Oite by way of Herakleia, where a narrow path leads as far as the ruins of TRACHIS; in those days there was a SANCTUARY OF ATHENE above Trachis, with statues in it.132 They hoped to climb up to Mount Oite by this path, and while they were at it to collect what the sanctuary yielded… garrison… Telesarchos. They defeated the barbarians in battle, but Telesarchos fell fighting: he was devoted to Greece, if ever a man was.

[2] The other barbarian commanders were staggered by the Greeks: they were at a loss over the future, seeing that what was in their hands already must come to nothing; but Brennos reasoned that if he could force the Aitolians to retreat into Aitolia, the war against Greece might be easier to manage. So he chose forty thousand infantry out of the army, and about eight hundred cavalry, and put Orestorios and Komboutis in command, to go back by the bridges of the Spercheios, make their way through Thessaly, and strike at Aitolia. It was Komboutis and Orestorios who committed the atrocities on the Kallieans, the most horrifying wickedness I have ever heard of, not like the crimes of human beings at all. They butchered every human male of that entire race, the old men and the children at the breast; and the Gauls drank the blood and ate the flesh of those of the slaughtered babies that were fattest with milk. Any woman and mature virgins with a spark of pride killed themselves as soon as the city fell; those who lived were subjected with wanton violence to every form of outrage by men as remote from mercy as they were remote from love. Women who came on a Gaulish sword committed suicide with their own hands; it was not long before the others were to die by famishing hunger and sleeplessness, outraged in an endless succession by pitiless and barbarous men: they mated with the dying: they mated with the already dead.

[3] The Aitolians got news of the kind of calamity that was on them, and at once they raced back at speed from Thermopylai and concentrated their power into Aitolia.

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