“If valour’s best apportionment Be noble death, To us, elect, hath Fortune lent This victor wreath. For Hellas Freedom’s crown to gain We made the quest, And ageless glory we attain Here laid to rest.” But the Spartans inspired his finer eloquence:— “Glory unquenchable their country Hath on her brow, But death’s pale cloud the men who crowned her Enfoldeth now. Yet, dead, they die not. Glory’s herald Descends the dome And from the halls of Death, triumphant, Now leads them home.” When Platæa next appears in a great passage of literature she is shorn of her glory, the helpless prey of a foreign enemy and a hostile neighbour. During the Peloponnesian War, in 431 B. C., the Spartans conquered the city and, to please the Thebans, razed it to the ground. Thucydides’s account of the tragic occurrence includes the speeches made to the Spartans by the Platæans, who prayed for their lives, and by the Thebans, who urged their murder. That no speeches in Thucydides are more dramatic has been generally conceded from the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. They have made it bitter even now to remember that the selfish opportunism and merciless rancour of the Thebans prevailed against the memories of “the great days of old,” invoked by the Platæans: “Look yonder to the sepulchres of your fathers slain by the Medes and buried in this land. Them we have honoured year by year with public offerings of raiment and such other things as usage calls for.... Pausanias gave them burial here because he felt that he was placing them with friends and in a friendly land. But you, if you shall slay us and shall make Platæa Theban land, what do you else in this than leave your fathers and your kinsmen, bereft of honours that are theirs, among murderers and in a hostile land? Nay more, you will actually enslave a country in which the Hellenes won their liberty and bring to desolation sanctuaries of the gods in which they prayed before they gained mastery over the Medes.” The desolation fell. Later the little town was rebuilt, destroyed once more, and finally restored, though somewhat meanly, in the time of Alexander. Now not even a modern village brings life to the ancient site. Only ruins of the Alexandrian walls remain.