394 HISTORY OF GREECE. do what you think best in it : you need not ask any truce at oul hands ; you can bury your dead without a truce." l The Boeotians knew that at this moment the field of battle was under guard by a detachment of their army, 2 and that the Athenians could not obtain the dead bodies without permission ; but since the Athe- nian herald had asserted the reverse as a matter of fact, we can hardly wonder that they resented the production of such an argument ; meeting it by a reply sufficiently pertinent in mere diplomatic fencing. But if the Athenian herald, instead of raising the incidental point of territorial property, combined with an incautious defini- tion of that which constituted territorial property, as a defence against the alleged desecration of the temple of Delium, had con- fined himself to vhe main issue, he would have put the Boeotians completely in the wrong. According to principles universally respected in Greece, the victor, if solicited, was held bound to grant to the vanquished a truce for burying his dead ; to grant and permit it absolutely, without annexing any conditions. On this, the main point in debate, the Boeotians sinned against the most sacred international law of Greece, when they exacted the evacuation of the temple at Delium as a condition for consenting to permit the burial of the Athenian dead. Ultimately, after they had taken Delium, we shall find that they did grant it un- conditionally ; and we may doubt whether they would have ever persisted in refusing it, if the Athenian herald had pressed this one important principle separately and exclusively ; and if he ad not, by an unskilful plea in vindication of the right to occupy 1 See the notes of Poppo, Goller, Dr. Arnold, and other commentators, on these chapters. Neither these notes, nor the Scholiast, seem to me in all parts satisfac- tory ; nor do they seize the spirit of the argument between the Athenian herald and the Bosotian officers, which will be found perfectly consistent as a piece of diplomatic interchange. In particular, they do not take notice that it is the Athenian herald who first raises the question, what is Athenian territory and what is Boeotian : and that he defines Athenian territory to be that in which the force of Athens is superior. The retort of the Boeotians refers to that definition ; not to the question of rightful claim to any territory, apart from actual
superiority of force. * Thu',yd. iv, 97.
