ran down and kept up volleys of stones. These were held in check by
the archers and peltasts; and steadily step by step the mass marched
on, first to the position from which the barbarians and those with
them had been driven two days back, and where the enemy were now drawn 23
up to meet them. Thus it came to pass that the barbarians first
grappled with the peltasts and maintained the battle until the heavy
infantry were close, when they turned and fled. The peltasts followed
without delay, and pursued them right up to their city, while the
heavy troops in unbroken order followed. As soon as they were up at
the houses of the capital, there and then the enemy, collecting all
together in one strong body, fought valiantly, and hurled their
javelins, or else clenched their long stout spears, almost too heavy
for a man to wield, and did their best to ward off the attack at close
quarters.

But when the Hellenes, instead of giving way, kept massing together
more thickly, the barbarians fled from this place also, and in a body
deserted the fortress. Their king, who sat in his wooden tower or
mossyn, built on the citadel (there he sits and there they maintain
him, all at the common cost, and guard him narrowly), refused to come
forth, as did also those in the fortress first taken, and so were
burnt to a cinder where they were, their mossyns, themselves, and all.
The Hellenes, pillaging and ransacking these places, discovered in the
different houses treasures and magazines of loaves, pile upon pile,
"the ancestral stores," as the Mossynoecians told them; but the new
corn was laid up apart with the straw-stalk and ear together, and this
was for the most part spelt. Slices of dolphin were another discovery,
in narrow-necked jars, all properly salted and pickled; and there was
blubber of dolphin in vessels, which the Mossynoecians used precisely
as the Hellenes use oil. Then there were large stores of nuts on the