Barbarians

Thus Plato thinks that some of the barbarians too are philosophers, while Epicurus, on the contrary, supposes that the Greeks alone are able to philosophize.

And that most of them were barbarians by race and were educated among barbarians — what need to say it, since Pythagoras was shown to be a Tyrrhenian or a Tyrian, Antisthenes a Phrygian, and Orpheus an Odrysian or a Thracian?

"As, then, you received Jesus Christ the Lord, walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and made firm in the faith" — and persuasion is the making firm of faith — "see that there be no one who carries you off as spoil from the faith that is in Christ, through philosophy and empty deceit," the kind that does away with providence, "according to the tradition of men.

Now our ancestors will be seen to have preserved without ceasing the spirit of concord towards the Hellenes and of hatred towards the barbarians which they inherited from the Trojan War and to have remained steadfast in this policy.

And after this, they founded many great cities on both continents, swept the barbarians back from the sea, and taught the Hellenes in what way they should manage their own countries and against whom they should wage war in order to make Hellas great.

Now both Athens and Lacedaemon incurred the hatred of their subjects and were plunged into war and confusion, but in these circumstances it will be found that our city, although attacked by all the Hellenes and by the barbarians as well, was able to hold out against them for ten years, while the Lacedaemonians, though still the leading power by land, after waging war against the Thebans alone and …

At this time, when the troops were marshalled under arms, the number of the Greeks was found to be ten thousand four hundred hoplites, and two thousand five hundred peltasts, while the number of the barbarians under Cyrus was one hundred thousand and there were about twenty scythe-bearing chariots.

for once let ill fortune overtake us, and all these barbarians whom you see will be more hostile to us than are those who stand with the King.

Men of Greece, it is not because I have not barbarians enough that I have brought you hither to fight for me;

For if the fearful things of the Lord have not instructed us, nor have such great blows brought us to perception — that because of our lawlessness the Lord abandoned us and gave us into the hands of the barbarians, and the people was led away captive into the enemies' land and given over to dispersion, because those who bear the name of Christ dared these things;

And since many in the incursion of the barbarians transgressed their faith in God, performing pagan oaths, and tasting certain unlawful things offered to them among the magical idols, let these be ordered according to the canons already set forth by our fathers.

For lo, every race of barbarians, as far as the bounds of Ocean, has come bringing me gifts at my feet.

Saved from Troy and from a barbarian land, you have come only to fall upon barbarian swords.

But the son of Atreus, standing where he slew the bull, cried out to his comrades, Why do you, the pick of Hellas, delay to slaughter and kill the barbarians and hurl them from the ship into the waves?

Show it against the barbarians!

And, finally, what discourse could have a nobler or a greater theme than one which summons the Hellenes to make an expedition against the barbarians and counsels them to be of one mind among themselves?

In it I summon the Hellenes to make an expedition against the barbarians, and I dispute the right of the Lacedaemonians to take the lead.

and they ought, furthermore, to appreciate the fact that while any number of men both among the Hellenes and among the barbarians have been able to lay down laws, there are not many who can discourse upon questions of public welfare in a spirit worthy both of Athens and of Hellas.

And it is not difficult for you to attain this if you determine to show yourself equally friendly to all, and cease treating some of the cities as friends and others as strangers, and if, furthermore, you fix your choice upon the kind of policy by which you can make yourself trusted by the Hellenes and feared by the barbarians.

But as to the expedition against Asia, we shall urge upon the cities which I have called upon you to reconcile that it is their duty to go to war with the barbarians, only when we see that they have ceased from discord.

As I kept going over these questions in my own thoughts, I found that on no other condition could Athens remain at peace, unless the greatest states of Hellas should resolve to put an end to their mutual quarrels and carry the war beyond our borders into Asia, and should determine to wrest from the barbarians the advantages which they now think it proper to get for themselves at the expense of the Hellenes.

We shall then say that Greeks fight and wage war with barbarians, and barbarians with Greeks, and are enemies by nature, and that war is the fit name for this enmity and hatred.

First, in the matter of making slaves of the defeated, do you think it right for Greeks to reduce Greek cities to slavery, or rather that so far as they are able, they should not suffer any other city to do so, but should accustom Greeks to spare Greeks, foreseeing the danger of enslavement by the barbarians?

But since we have begun we must go forward to the rough part of our law, after begging these fellows not to mind their own business but to be serious, and reminding them that it is not long since the Greeks thought it disgraceful and ridiculous, as most of the barbarians do now, for men to be seen naked.

Now the Greeks who dwelt by the sea gave many gifts and secured an agreement to the effect that while they should not receive the barbarians within their walls, they would yet pay tribute and serve under him in the field wherever Cyrus should direct.

Then, when the two armies were near each other, the Assyrians and their allies drew a ditch around their camp, as even to this day the barbarian kings do whenever they go into camp;

For all these reasons and also because they think that if they are behind fortifications they are in a position to choose their time for fighting, the Assyrians and the rest of the barbarians throw up breastworks.

In former days, after the battle of Salamis, our city stood in high repute, and although our walls had been thrown down by the barbarians, yet so long as we had peace with the Lacedaemonians we preserved our democratic form of government.

that beasts have been consecrated by the barbarians for a benefit, but that of your gods not only is there no benefit forthcoming, but not even any deed at all.

But not so the Egyptians, nor the Syrians, nor almost any of the barbarians;

Suppose someone carried this law to the barbarous nations from whom we import our slaves;

If the barbarians heard these words and understood their import, do you not think that they would unanimously appoint you their protectors?

There are in Greece men so mild and humane in disposition that though they have often been wronged by you, and though they have inherited a natural hostility towards you, yet they permit no insult to be offered even to the men whom they have bought for a price and keep as their slaves.

Was it not he who, being appointed treasurer at the Acropolis, stole from that place those prizes of victory which our ancestors carried off from the barbarians, the throne with silver feet, and Mardonius’s scimitar, which weighed three hundred darics?

Because you are indifferent to these advantages and allow them to be taken from you, Philip is prosperous and powerful and formidable to Greeks and barbarians alike, while you are deserted and humiliated, famous for your well-stocked markets, but in provision for your proper needs, contemptible.

but if the oath that we took and the terms on which we made peace are published for all men to read, and if it is proved that from the first, even before Diopithes set sail with colonists, whom they now accuse of having started hostilities, Philip has unfairly taken much that is ours, about which your decrees denouncing him still stand good, and that he is all the time repeatedly seizing the prope …

and whereas he appropriates cities not belonging to him, and has captured in war some that actually belonged to the Athenians without provocation from the Athenian people, and is today making great advances in violence and cruelty, for of some Greek cities he overthrows the constitution, putting a garrison in them, others he razes to the ground, selling the inhabitants into slavery, others he colo …

also that ambassadors be sent to the other Greeks, but first of all to the Thebans, because Philip is nearest to their territory, and exhort them not to be dismayed at Philip, but to hold fast to their own liberty and the liberty of the other Greeks, assuring them t hat the people of Athens, harboring no ill will for previous mutual differences between the states, will help them with troops, money …

and whereas, so long as the People of Athens saw him seizing barbarian states, belonging to themselves alone, they conceived that their own wrongs were of less account, but now, seeing Greek states outraged or wiped out, they consider it a scandal and unworthy of the reputation of their ancestors to suffer the Greeks to he enslaved;

The greatest humiliation, however, that we have suffered is that all the other Greeks and barbarians dread your enmity, but these upstarts alone can make you despise yourselves, sometimes by persuasion, sometimes by force, as if Abdera or Maronea, and not Athens, were the scene of their political activities.

On the other hand, he learns that the ancestors of these Thebans and Argives either fought for the barbarians or did not fight against them.

The best evidence for this may be found in the poetry of Homer, in which he represents the Greeks and barbarians warring against one another with this equipment.

and farmers wear long hair, never having even heard the name of philosophy, and, by Zeus, the most of the barbarians, some for shelter, some thinking it befits them.

Aristotle expressly appeals to the actual social state of ‘barbarians.

remember the thousand who went to meet the foe at Thermopylae, who, although they engaged seven hundred thousand of the barbarians, did not flee nor suffer defeat, but laid down their lives on the spot where they were stationed, acquitting themselves so nobly that even those who eulogize them with all the resources of art can find no praises equal to their valor.

Well then, the Hellenes felt such confidence in those who governed the city in those times that most of them of their own accord placed themselves under the power of Athens, while the barbarians were so far from meddling in the affairs of the Hellenes that they neither sailed their ships-of-war this side of the Phaselis nor marched their armies beyond the Halys River, refraining, on the contrary, from all aggression.

Today, however, circumstances are so completely reversed that the Hellenes regard Athens with hatred and the barbarians hold us in contempt.

This conclusion we may justly draw from the ancient struggles which they carried on against the Amazons and the Thracians and all of the Peloponnesians, and also from the wars which they waged against the Persians, in which, both when they fought alone and when they were aided by the Peloponnesians, whether on land or on the sea, they were victorious over the barbarians and were adjudged the meed of valor;

For the king well knew that many men, both Greeks and barbarians, starting from low and insignificant beginnings, had overthrown great dynasties, and he was aware too of the lofty ambition of Evagoras and that the growth of both his prestige and of his political activities was not taking place by slow degrees:

the citizens of barbarian birth he transformed into Hellenes, cravens into warriors, and obscure individuals into men of note:

for not alone in their own cities were they pre-eminent, or in the places where they made their homes, but when an expedition was organized by the Greeks against the barbarians, and a great army was assembled on either side and no warrior of repute was absent, Achilles above all distinguished himself in these perils.

What man would have rejected marriage with Helen, at whose abduction the Greeks were as incensed as if all Greece had been laid waste, while the barbarians were as filled with pride as if they had conquered us all?

and in consequence, we experienced a change so great that, although in former times any barbarians who were in misfortune presumed to be rulers over the Greek cities (for example, Danaus, an exile from Egypt, occupied Argos, Cadmus of Sidon became king of Thebes, the Carians colonized the islands, and Pelops, son of Tantalus, became master of all the Peloponnese), yet after that war our race expan …