aconian discipline, by which they would be able to
surpass all the other kings of their age. He put off the envoys with
these stories, and made them accompany his army, but on reaching the
Lacedaemonian territory he at once began to plunder and lay it waste.
When the envoys remonstrated with him for having invaded their country
without a declaration of war, he answered--"We know well that neither
do you Spartans tell any one beforehand what you mean to do." One of
the envoys, by name Mandrokleides, said in his broad Laconian speech,
"If you are a god, we shall not be harmed by you, for we have done no
wrong; but if you are a man, you may meet with a stronger man than
yourself."

XXVII. After this he marched upon Lacedaemon itself. Kleonymus urged
him to make an assault immediately on the evening of his arrival, but
Pyrrhus is said to have refused to do so, for fear that his soldiers
might sack and destroy the city if they took it at night, while they
might easily take it in the daytime. Indeed the Spartans were taken by
surprise, and very few were in the city, the king Areus himself being
absent in Crete on an expedition to assist the people of Gortyna. And
it was this weakness and absence of defenders that really proved the
salvation of the city, for Pyrrhus, not expecting any resistance,
pitched his camp outside the walls, while the friends and helots of
Kleonymus made ready his house and decorated it, expecting that
Pyrrhus would sup there with him. At nightfall the Lacedaemonians at
first proposed to send away the women to Crete, but they refused to
leave the city. Archidamia[47] even went to the senate-house with a
drawn sword in her hands, and on behalf of the women of Sparta
reproached the men for insulting them by supposing that they would
survive the capture of their city. After this, they determined to dig
a ditch along the side of the city nearest to Pyrrhus's camp, and to
barricade the ends of it with waggons buried up to the axles in the
ground, to resist the charge of the elephants. When this work was
begun the women and girls appeared with their tunics girt up for
work,[48] and laboured at digging the ditch together with the older
men. They bade those who were to fight on the morrow take rest, and
they themselves alone dug one-third of the entire ditch. The width of
the ditch was six cubits, its depth four cubits, and its length eight
hundred feet, as we are told by Phylarchus, though Hieronymus makes
it