Mediterranean Hegemon of Ancient Greece Chapter 178: Athens surrender (1)

lnmao.org, the fastest update to the latest chapter of the Mediterranean Overlord of Ancient Greece!

Callistratus brought back Dionia to agree to the prerequisite requirements of the peace agreement, and read it out at the citizens meeting held on Prix Hill, which immediately aroused the anger of the citizens, according to Isocrates’ words , "The fierce Dionia wants to destroy Athens!".

So the citizens fought bravely and unanimously agreed: to fight to the death against the Dionians who were about to destroy Athens.

The Athenians were ready for a comprehensive defense, and after the two Dionian armies joined forces, the self-aware Cloto Kataks took the initiative to cede the unified military command to Patroclus.

Patroclus did not refuse, but did not immediately launch an attack on the city of Athens. Instead, he ordered the 100,000 troops to build strong camps around the city (the 100,000 troops not only include Klotokattak). The Dionian army led by Si and Patroclus, as well as the Allied armies of Thebes, Mandinia, Argos, Corinth, and Megara).

At the same time, he also divided up troops and swept the entire Attica area. After capturing the villages and towns, he drove all the people from the villages and towns who could not escape into Athens in time to the city, and then the army immediately moved away.

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

Kalisstratus and Ifekrates could not stop them at all, because these people are all Athenians, relatives or relatives of the citizens of the city, so the city of Athens can be accommodated within a few days The population of the entire Attica region has reached nearly 300,000 people.

Although Athens is the largest city in mainland Greece, plus the port of Piraeus, the entire urban area is more than 20 square kilometers, but such a large population still brings a lot of pressure on the city to survive: Many Attica residents who fled into the city slept directly in the courtyards and squares of public buildings where they did not live. Even the temporary shelters built by the people can be seen everywhere on both sides of the road from Piraeus to the Acropolis. The sanitation and tidiness of the city cannot be guaranteed. There are excrement everywhere, and few people clean it. Moreover, it is still at the end of September, and the temperature is still high.

For the generals, this is still a small problem, and the main thing that gives them a headache is food. Although a lot of food was hoarded in the city in order to organize the coalition to start war with Dionia, in the face of such a large population pressure, it still felt tight. Callistratus and others had to spend some words to persuade the 500-member council, and then organize the manpower to strictly control the consumption of food.

In addition, drinking water is also a problem. There were originally several rivers in the Athens area, but they are all outside the city and under the control of the Dionian army. Therefore, the people in the city can only rely on the wells in the city. Residents and refugees outside the city often fight for the wells. There were disputes or even conflicts over the right to use, and the Athens government had to send additional staff to maintain the order of water intake for each well.

During this period, several Athens doctors who have participated in the Greek Medical Forum organized by the Dionian Academy of Medicine for many times together warned the Athens government: we must try our best to keep the city clean, otherwise it will be too dirty The environment will lead to the occurrence of plague.

Their suggestions attracted the attention of the General Executive Committee. After the Peloponnesian War began, the Spartan forces attacked Athens by land. At the time, Athens was also based on the defense of the city. The situation is not much different from today. , But it didn't take long for a major plague in the city, and Pericles also fell ill and died. Although these doctors claimed that "the knowledge they learned was learned from the Dionian School of Medicine", the generals of Athens did not ignore it because of this. After all, the high level of Dionian medicine has gradually gained over the years. Some city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean agree, and the nightmare caused by the plague to the Athenians is too terrible, so even if it is the enemy, Callistratus and others still decided to adopt their suggestions and send a large number of people to clean the streets every day. Try to keep the city clean.

Before the official battle, the top Athenian leaders headed by Calistratus were already exhausted due to the surge in administrative affairs in the city, and the people were also struggling through every day with tension, panic, and busyness.

But Dionia’s army still did not launch an offensive. Only the ballista teams of each legion, under the order of Patroclus, evenly distributed around the city of Athens, began to launch a large number of small stone bullets into the city. These stone bullets continued to cross the city wall, smashing nearby houses, causing panic among the people of Athens, forcing them to stay away from the city wall, and causing crowding in the center of the city.

In order to ensure that the soldiers went up and down the city wall were not hindered, the Athenian officials had to arrange for slaves to clean up the rubble caused by stone bombing near the city wall. It didn’t take long for someone to keep secretly reporting to the city hall, saying, “The family’s The slave went out quietly many times to meet with other slaves secretly, and his whereabouts were secret."

The city hall immediately dispatched a patrol and arrested some slaves for interrogation. The results were shocking. The 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, and the main meaning was " As long as the slaves dare to rise up against their masters and city-states and assist the Dionian army to break through the city, Dionian will not only give them freedom, but will even give them land..."

Athens’ culture was prosperous and commerce was developed. Many slaves were not only literate, but they were also trained by their masters to become their business assistants. They also knew something about the "Western Kingdom of Dionian" in their dealings with foreign merchants. Treating slaves more tolerantly", so some slaves were a little tempted, and they began to contact and discuss privately. As a result, the news quickly spread among the slaves in Athens...

When the general executive committee learned about it, they were all in a cold sweat, because the population of slaves in the city of Athens was as high as 100,000, almost the same as the number of people in Athens, and the living conditions of the slaves in Athens were not all better than the black labor of Sparta. For example, the number of mining slaves in the Lauriang Silver Mine is extremely large, and their lives are extremely poor. Many slaves die in the mine every year...Of course, these slaves are full of resentment towards the slave owners who exploited them. The incident against the master. The most famous one is that during the Peloponnesian War, more than 40,000 Athenian slaves united and escaped from the city of Athens, which caused a major blow to the national power of Athens.

In the previous military meeting, Efekratus also proposed: organize young and strong male officials, distribute weapons, and assist in defending the city.

Although this suggestion was not passed immediately, it did make some people moved, so it has been under discussion, but now that this kind of thing has happened, it will naturally not be considered again. And under their orders, the city patrol immediately took action and arrested hundreds of slaves who had previously cleaned the ruins.

At the same time, the 500-member council passed a resolution asking the people in the city to take good care of their slaves and prohibit them from going out, and immediately report to the city hall if any abnormalities are found. The city hall also organized a group of soldiers to take care of the city-state slaves.

Just as the General Executive Committee was very busy, another bad news came: the main city built high on the island of Aegina finally fell after being stubbornly defended against several assaults by the Dionian army.

Since then, the ships of Dionian’s First Fleet and Third Fleet have stationed in the port of Aegina, Ismia in Corinth, and Megala, so that they can compare Athens with The port of Reeves blockades De Mi to be airtight.

On land, Patroclus gave another order: let the soldiers who have built the camp begin to build the siege platform 100 meters away from the city.

At the same time, he gave an order: Let each legion engineering battalion build a super siege tower.

After the order was given, 100,000 soldiers immediately began to be busy, and the surrounding areas outside Athens became construction sites, dusty every day. The transport fleet of Dionia was also busy. They transported the trees felled by the Messenians and Laconians from Mount Tagettos to Megara, and then transported to Diony by the pack team. In the sub-camp, engineers will lead craftsmen to make siege equipment. They are very stout and tall).

Standing on the top of the 10-meter high city of Athens, the Athenian citizen soldiers are getting nervous day by day, because they see the hills on the flat ground outside the city, and they are getting higher every day. It's over the walls of Athens.

Efekratus did not have passive defenses. He had led Thracian light shields and mercenaries from Jason out of the city to carry out raids several times. At the beginning, he achieved some victories and killed some enemy soldiers, even In a night attack, the camp of the Megara army was broken, 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 forces learned their lesson. Under the strict requirements of Patroclus, the various barracks not only strengthened their defenses, but also strengthened their ties with each other, and the Dionian soldiers We also connected the soil ditches in front of each siege platform (formed by the construction of the siege platform to dig the soil) and expanded them into trenches, which made it difficult for the Athenian army to even raid the construction site. Therefore, after several raids that damaged soldiers and lost generals, Iphikratus had to temporarily stop this risky approach.

Therefore, the construction speed of the Dionian soldiers was greatly accelerated. Finally, siege platforms more than 10 meters high were towering outside the city of Athens. Looking up at these mounds higher than the city wall, the Athenian soldiers felt panic. But what made them even more panicked was that stone bullets roared from these mounds, crossed the city wall, and landed in the city of Athens.