The legend that Athena, observing in the water the distortion of her features caused by playing that instrument, flung it away, probably indicates that the Boeotians whom the Athenians regarded with contempt, used the flute in their worship of the Boeotian Athena.
The affair seems to have been well planned up to a certain point, and well executed; but the Athenian van, flushed with a first success, their ranks broken and disordered by a pursuit of the enemy over rough ground, were repulsed with great loss by a body of heavy-armed Boeotians, and driven back in disorder.
A bridge was first constructed here in the twenty-first year of the Peloponnesian War, when Euboea revolted from Athens; and thus the Boeotians, whose work it was, contrived to make that country "an island to every one but themselves."
The Boeotians by this means secured a powerful weapon of offence against Athens, being able to impede their supplies of gold and corn from Thrace, of timber from Macedonia, and of horses from Thessaly.
With the exception of the Minyae, the original peoples were soon absorbed by these immigrants, and the Boeotians henceforth appear as a homogeneous nation.