The discourse of the Thebans, inspired by bitter, and as yet unsatisfied hatred against Platæa, proved effectual: or rather it was superfluous,—the minds of the Lacedæmonians having before been made up. After the proposition twice made by Archidamus to the Platæans, inviting them to remain neutral, and even offering to guarantee their neutrality,—after the solemn apologetic protest tendered by him upon their refusal, to the gods, before he began the siege,—the Lacedæmonians conceived themselves exonerated from all obligation to respect the sanctity of the place;[439] looking upon the inhabitants as having voluntarily renounced their inviolability and sealed their own ruin. Hence the importance attached to that protest, and the emphatic detail with which it is set forth in Thucydidês. The five judges, as their only reply to the two harangues, again called the Platæans before them, and repeated to every one of them individually, the same question which had before been put: each one of them, as he successively replied in the negative,[440] was taken away and killed, together with the twenty-five Athenian prisoners. The women captured were sold as slaves: and the town and territory of Platæa were handed over to the Thebans, who at first established in them a few oligarchical Platæan exiles, together with some Megarian exiles,—but after a few months recalled this step, and blotted out Platæa,[441] as a separate town and territory, from the muster-roll of Hellas. They pulled down all the private buildings and employed the materials to build a vast barrack all round the Heræum, or temple of Hêrê, two hundred feet in every direction, with apartments of two stories above and below; partly as accommodation for visitors to the temple, partly as an abode for the tenant-farmers or graziers who were to occupy the land. A new temple of one hundred feet in length, was also built in honor of Hêrê, and ornamented with couches, prepared from the brass and iron furniture found in the private houses of the Platæans.[442] The Platæan territory was let out for ten years, as public property belonging to Thebes, and was hired by private Theban cultivators. [439] Thucyd. iii, 68; ii, 74. To construe the former of these passages (iii, 68) as it now stands, is very difficult, if not impossible; we can only pretend to give what seems to be its substantial meaning. [440] Diodorus (xii, 56) in his meagre abridgment of the siege and fate of Platæa, somewhat amplifies the brevity and simplicity of the question as given by Thucydidês. [441] Thucyd. iii, 57. ὑμᾶς δὲ (you Spartans) καὶ ἐκ παντὸς τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ πανοικησίᾳ διὰ Θηβαίους (Πλάταιαν) ~ἐξαλεῖψαι~. [442] Thucyd. iii, 69.