The final stage of the battle is the trophy:  the visible sign on the battlefield that here such-and-such a side was victorious.  The limbs are lopped off a tree, and some armor captured from the foe is hung upon it.  After indecisive battles sometimes both sides set up trophies; in that case a second battle is likely to settle the question.  Then when the victors have recovered from their own happy demoralization, they march into the enemy’s country; by burning all the farmsteads, driving off the cattle, filling up the wells, girdling the olive and fruit trees, they reduce the defeated side (that has fled to its fortified town) to desperation.  If they have any prisoners, they threaten to put them to death.  The result, of course, is frequently a treaty of peace in favor of the victors.

96.  The Siege of Fortified Towns.—­If, however, one party cannot be induced to risk an open battle; or if, despite a defeat, it allows the enemy to ravage the fields, and yet persists in defending the walls of its town,—­the war is likely to be tedious and indecisive.  It is notorious that Greeks dislike hard sieges.  The soldiers are the fellow townsmen of the generals.  If the latter order an assault with scaling ladders and it is repulsed with bloody loss, the generals risk a prosecution when they get home for “casting away the lives of their fellow citizens."[*] In short, fifty men behind a stout wall and “able to throw anything” are in a position to defy an army.

[*]In siege warfare Oriental kings had a great advantage over Greek commanders.  The former could sacrifice as many of their “slaves” as they pleased, in desperate assaults.  The latter had always to bear in mind their accountability at home for any desperate and costly attack.

The one really sure means of taking a town is to build a counter wall around it and starve it out,—­a slow and very expensive, thought not bloody process.  Only when something very great is at stake will a Greek city-state attempt this.[*] There is always another chance, however.  Almost every Greek town has a discontented faction within its walls, and many a time there will be a traitor who will betray a gate to the enemy; and then the siege will be suddenly ended in one murderous night.

[*]As in the siege of Potidea (432-429 B.C.), when if Athens had failed to take the place, her hold upon her whole empire would have been jeopardized.

97.  The Introduction of New Tactics.—­Greek battles are thus very simple things as a rule.  It is the general who, accepting the typical conditions as he finds them, and avoiding any gross and obvious blunders, can put his men in a state of perfect fitness, physical and moral, that is likely to win the day.  Of late there has come indeed a spirit of innovation.  At Leuctra (371 B.C.) Epaminodas the Theban defeated the Spartans by the unheard-of device of massing a part of his hoplites fifty deep (instead of the orthodox