S58 HISTORY OF GREECE. the Athenians. They abandoned their mei:enary auxiliaries altogether, and only stipulated that they should themselves be sent to Athens, and left to the discretion of the Athenian people. Eurymedon, assenting to these terms, deposited the disarmed prisoners in the neighboring islet of Ptychia, under the distinct condition that, if a single man tried to escape, the whole capitula- tion should be null and void. 1 Unfortunately for these prisoners, the orders given to Euryme- don carried him onward straight to Sicily. It was irksome, therefore, to him to send away a detachment of his squadron to convey these men to Athens, while the honors of delivering them there would be reaped, not by himself, but by the officer to whom they might be confided : and the Korkyrreans in the city, on their part, were equally anxious that the prisoners should not be sent to Athens ; for their animosity against them was bitter in the extreme, and they were afraid that the Athenians might spare their lives, so that their hostility against the island might be again resumed. And thus a mean jealousy on the part of Eurymedon, combined with revenge and insecurity on the part of the victorious Korkyrrcans, brought about a cruel catastrophe, paralleled nowhere else in Greece, though too well in keeping with the previous acts of the bloody drama enacted in this island. The Korkyroean leaders, seemingly not without the privity of Eurymedon, sent across to Ptychia fraudulent emissaries under the guise of friends to the prisoners. These emissaries assur- ing the prisoners that the Athenian commanders, in spite of the convention signed, were about to hand them over to the Korky- rsean people for destruction induced some of them to attempt escape in a boat prepared for the purpose. By concert, the boat was seized in the act of escaping, so that the terms of the capit- ulation were really violated : upon which Eurymedon handed over the prisoners to their enemies in the island, who imprisoned them all together in one vast building, under guard of hoplites. From this building they were drawn out in companies of twenty men each, chained together in couples, and compelled to march between two lines of hoplites marshalled on each side of the road.
1 Thucyd. iv, 46.
