nt and other
offerings, which things Artayctes carried off as plunder, the king
having granted them to him. And he deceived Xerxes by saying to him
some such words as these: "Master, there is here the house of a man,
a Hellene, who made an expedition against thy land and met with his
deserts and was slain: this man's house I ask thee to give to me, that
every one may learn not to make expeditions against thy land." By saying
this it was likely that he would easily enough persuade Xerxes to give
him a man's house, not suspecting what was in his mind: and when he said
that Protesilaos had made expedition against the land of the king, it
must be understood that the Persians consider all Asia to be theirs and
to belong to their reigning king. So when the things had been given him,
he brought them from Elaius to Sestos, and he sowed the sacred enclosure
for crops and occupied it as his own; and he himself, whenever he came
to Elaius, had commerce with women in the inner cell of the temple. 116
And now he was being besieged by the Athenians, when he had not made any
preparation for a siege nor had been expecting that the Hellenes would
come; for they fell upon him, as one may say, inevitably. 117.

117. When however autumn came and the siege still went on, the Athenians
began to be vexed at being absent from their own land and at the
same time not able to conquer the fortress, and they requested their
commanders to lead them away home; but these said that they would not do
so, until either they had taken the town or the public authority of the
Athenians sent for them home: and so they endured their present state.

118. Those however who were within the walls had now come to the
greatest misery, so that they boiled down the girths of their beds and
used them for food; and when they no longer had even these, then the
Persians and with them Artayctes and Oiobazos ran away and departed in
the night, climbing down by the back part of the wall, where the place
was left most unguarded by the enemy; and when day came, the men of the
Chersonese signified to the Athenians from the towers concerning that
which had happened, and opened the gates to them. So the greater number
of them went in pursuit, and the rest occupied the city..

119. Now Oiobazos, as he was escaping 119 into Thrace, was caught by the
Apsinthian Thracians and sacrificed to their native god Pleistoros with
their rites, and the rest who were with him they slaughtered