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 its dimensions more moderate.  At daybreak, when the enemy began to bestir themselves, the women armed the younger men, and handed over the ditch to them, bidding them defend it, as it would be pleasant for them to conquer in sight of their country, and glorious to die in the arms of their mothers and wives after having fought worthily of Sparta.  Chilonis herself had retired to her own house, and had a halter ready about her neck, in order that if the city were taken she might not fall into the hands of Kleonymus.

XXVIII.  Pyrrhus himself led a direct attack of his infantry against the Spartans, who were drawn up in deep order, and endeavoured to force his way through them, and to pass the ditch, which was difficult, because the newly dug earth afforded no secure footing to his soldiers.  Meanwhile his son Ptolemy led a chosen body of two thousand Gauls and Chaonians round the end of the ditch, and endeavoured to break through the barricade of waggons.  These stood so thick and so close together that they made it hard, not only for the assailants to cross them, but even for the Lacedaemonians to reach the point where they were menaced.  However, as the Gauls began to pull the wheels out of the earth and to drag the waggons