Examples without number might be collected of these horrors. It will be sufficient to advert briefly to a few, more to remind than to inform the reader. In the troubles of Corcyra[156] the nobles and the commons alternately triumphing over each other, carried on with the utmost ruthlessness the work of extermination with abundant baseness and perfidy, some portion of which attached to the Athenian generals: the wrongs and sufferings inflicted by the Spartans on the brave but unfortunate inhabitants of Messenia, with the annual butchery of the Helots, the treacherous withdrawal of suppliants from sanctuary, and their subsequent slaughter,[157] the extermination of the people of Hysia,[158] the precipitating of neutral merchants into pits,[159] the betrayal of the cities of Chalcidice and the islands, the massacre in cold blood of the Platæans, of four thousand Athenians in the Hellespont,[160] the reduction of innumerable cities to servitude: by the Athenians, the extermination of the people of Melos,[161] the slaughter of a thousand Mitylenians, the cruelties at Skione, Ægina, and Cythera;[162] but beyond these, and beyond all, the fearful excesses of civil strife at Miletos where the common people called Gergithes having risen in rebellion against the nobles and defeated them in battle, took their children and cast them into the cattle stalls where they were crushed and trampled to death by the infuriated oxen; but the nobles renewing the contest and obtaining ultimately the victory, seized upon their enemies,—men, women, children, and covered them with pitch, to which setting fire they burnt them alive.[163] Footnote 156: Thucyd. iii. 70. sqq. Footnote 157: Ælian. Var. Hist. vi. 7. Cf. Eurip. Andr. 445. seq. Footnote 158: Thucyd. v. 83. Footnote 159: Thucyd. ii. 67. Footnote 160: Pausan. ix. 32. 9. Footnote 161: Thucyd. v. 126; iii. 50. Footnote 162: Thucyd. v. 32; iv. 57. Footnote 163: Heracl. Pont. ap. Athen. xii. 26.