Lysander

But when Lysander did not sail out against him, because his fleet was considerably inferior in numbers, Alcibiades sailed back to Samos.

Then Lysander, after taking possession of his prizes and setting up a trophy at Notium, sailed across to Ephesus, while the Athenians went to Samos.

As for Lysander, when he had finished organising his fleet, he hauled ashore the ships which were at Ephesus, now ninety in number, and kept quiet, while the ships were being dried out and repaired.

" But after the Hellespont and Lysander, it is a shame.

And Lysander the Lacedaemonian, they say, declared his opinion that children must be deceived with knucklebones and balls, but men with oaths and words.

For in the following year, in the archonship of Alexias, they met with disaster in the sea-battle at Aegospotami, from which it came about that Lysander, having become master of the city, set up the Thirty in the following way.

When Lysander joined the oligarchs, the people, struck with fear, were compelled to vote for the oligarchy.

that whereas those detestable Megarians are so obsessed with their own dignity that, when the Lacedaemonians sent and ordered them to admit to their citizenship Hermo, the pilot, who, serving with Lysander, captured two hundred war-galleys on the occasion of our disaster at Aegospotami, they replied that they would make him a Megarian when they saw that the Lacedaemonians had made him a Spartan;

When the Boeotians hesitated upon some propositions made to them by Lysander, he asked them whether they intended that he should pass with erected or inclined spears, meaning by the expression in a hostile or a quiet manner.

but as it is, I shall be found innocent of having harmed any citizen in regard to his property, or of jeopardizing his life, or of having expunged his name from the list of active citizens, or of having inscribed his name on Lysander’s list.

And finally, when Lysander proclaimed that if anyone should import grain to you he would be punished with death, we were so zealous for the city’s welfare that, although no one else dared to bring in even his own, we intercepted the grain that was being brought in to them and discharged it at the Piraeus.

This Nicias, the plaintiff, after the Thirty Tyrants came into power and his enemies threatened to expunge his name from the number of those who were to have the rights of citizenship, and to include him in Lysander’s list, being in fear of the state of affairs, mortgaged his house, sent his slaves outside of Attica, conveyed his furniture to my house, gave in trust three talents of silver to Euth …

And surely you ought to find your ideal of a good general, not in one who by a single stroke of good fortune has attained, like Lysander, a success which it has been the lot of no other man to achieve, but one who, though loaded with many difficult responsibilities of all sorts, has always discharged them with honesty and wisdom.

Did not the Lacedaemonians and Lysander exert themselves as much to cause his death as to bring about the downfall of your dominion, in the belief that they could not be sure of the city’s loyalty if they demolished her walls unless they should also destroy the man who could rebuild them?

When he has learned the news from the assembly he reports it, and adds besides the account of the battle in the time of Aristophon the orator, and of the one the Lacedaemonians fought under Lysander, and the speeches he once delivered himself to general applause in the assembly.

Further, the story goes that when Lysander came to him bringing the gifts form the allies, this Cyrus showed him various marks of friendliness, as Lysander himself related once to a stranger at Megara, adding besides that Cyrus personally showed him round his paradise at Sardis.

Lysander himself declared, I should add, that on hearing this, he congratulated him in these words:

Well, Lysander, the whole of the measurement and arrangement is my own work, and I did some of the planting myself.