Starve them, and arm with air and water

If you cut the enemies' trees you will keep the other side from hiding. For not needing the others' pasture, the fodder brought along is enough, and whatever else has been thought out for a long campaign, toward having plenty of supplies and toward suffering nothing hard from the enemy — which is also the first deed of valor, because not to suffer is much better than to do harm. Pyrrhus, at any rate, though he had the advantage of the Romans, was consumed.

Time first, and wearing, and famine, and destruction, must especially be used against barbarians, whose gathering of the army is for a season and not a lasting force, but plunder from a raid. They bring foods measured in days and a stated number of missiles, and when those are spent their flight is obvious. Why then hurry to meet enemies whom, if I wait, I shall see driven by their own time-limit? Famine comes on them overdue, the few foods spent in vain. Come then, let us not even permit those starving men to flee. Let destruction without iron hold them, an end without battle. Let us beat them with air as ally and water as helper; with the elements let us arm against them. I general a secret array; I use a fight that does not show. Let every enemy fall when he has breathed, when he thirsts, or when he has eaten; I make all things dangerous to him. Let him starve if he stays, and take plague so that he may not flee. Let us do the work of a great prayer. Air as ally emptied Athens when it was filled with Lacedaemonians, and such a condition held the Carthaginians in Sicily. The victors dedicate such wars to their own gods. Let us too imitate those gods: automatic fortune comes about under our art.

Food, then, thus: let us make breads that will nourish the last day, from animals which are written down at the end, in pentagon 1, in which, along a line, are laid the signs of the Lydian mode being taken in besides — a defective zeta and an inverted tau. Shut both together into a vessel, sealing the lid with clay so that there may be no breathing-out for the beasts consumed inside by themselves; then grind their remains and put them into the water from which the cake is mixed. You will do the same if you smear the ovens with this juice; but for those who bake, this is a danger. lacuna Having prepared enough of such foods, furnish them to the enemies in whatever way you can.