Spartans

but they called them forward, and merely asked them this question,

Were they disposed voluntarily to surrender their city to the Lacedaemonians, and submit to them as their judges;

The Peloponnesians then fed the Plataeans for nine days, till the judges from Lacedaemon, five in number, arrived.

"And besides, I think, the song of exhortation, such as that of the Laconian marching-songs, most befitting the polity of Lycurgus and those practices of theirs:

And indeed in matters of the couch and the daily way of life Homer seems competent to give an education truly heroic and kingly, so that Lycurgus, having learned the Laconian common meals from him, established them by law for the Spartans.

For they possess as a far more august and excellent offering the scimitar of Mardonius and the shields of the Laconians once captured at Pylos, than the propylaea of the Acropolis and the Olympieum, built at a cost of more than ten thousand talents.

three hundred Spartan armed men;

When Aristodemus returned to Lacedaemon, he was disgraced and without honor.

They accordingly sent their advance guard, not expecting the war at Thermopylae to be decided so quickly.

But when Agesilaus, having received word of this in time, had got back to the city ahead of the enemy, the Spartiatae posted themselves at various points and kept guard, although they were extremely few.

Epaminondas, on the other hand, reflecting that the Arcadians would be coming to Lacedaemon to bring aid, had no desire to fight against them and against all the Lacedaemonians after they had come together, especially since they had met with success and his men with disaster;

For when Archidamus led the advance with not so much as a hundred men and, after crossing the very thing which seemed to present an obstacle, marched uphill against the adversary, at that moment the fire-breathers, the men who had defeated the Lacedaemonians, the men who were altogether superior in numbers and were occupying higher ground besides, did not withstand the attack of the troops under A …

The Lacedaemonians, who had murdered the heralds of the Persians, were said by that act to have confounded every distinction between right and wrong, as it is acknowledged by all nations.

which was done by the Athenians in the case of the messengers passing between the Persians and Spartans, and by the Illyrians in that of those, who carried on the intercourse between the Essians and Romans.

An action of this kind was done by Pausanias the Lacedaemonian, who, being urged by the people of Aegina to retaliate upon the Persians for their treatment of Leonidas, rejected the advice, as unbecoming his own character and the Grecian name.

Clearchus was a Lacedaemonian exile;

and the ships from Peloponnesus arrived to meet Cyrus, thirty-five in number, with Pythagoras the Lacedaemonian as admiral in command of them.

Cheirisophus the Lacedaemonian also arrived with this fleet, coming in response to Cyru s’ summons, together with seven hundred hoplites, over whom he continued to hold command in the army of Cyrus.

nor did the Spartans treating with the Athenians recall the occasions when Sparta had aided Athens, but those on which Athens had aided Sparta.

and sometimes such mock humility seems to be really boastfulness, like the dress of the Spartans, for extreme negligence in dress, as well as excessive attention to it, has a touch of ostentation.

whereas those who have been deceived as to the danger, if they learn or suspect the true state of affairs, take to flight, as the Argives did when they encountered the Lacedaemonians and thought they were Sicyonians.

which the Spartans extended even to their women, who in other cities are hidden away in the shade of their walls in the softest manner of living.

At Sparta, too, boys are so received with scourges at the altar that much blood flows from their flesh — sometimes even, as I heard when I was there, to the point of death;

With like spirit the Spartans fell at Thermopylae, on whom Simonides wrote:

And the wretched Lacedaemonians, who barely touched these acts at their beginning in connection with the seizure of the temple, they who once claimed the right to lead the Greeks, are now about to be sent to Alexander to serve as hostages, and to make an exhibition of their misfortunes —destined, themselves and their country, to suffer whatever may please him;

The Lacedaemonians and their mercenary force had been successful in battle and had destroyed the forces of Corrhagus;

And not even this will he allow to be done carelessly, but only after careful examination by the Senate, to determine who of them actually stood siege at Phyle when the Lacedaemonians and the Thirty made their attack, not those who deserted their post—as at Chaeroneia—in the face of the advancing enemy.

And did not the Lacedaemonians take part with us in the negotiations against the Thebans, and did they not finally come into open collision with them in Macedonia and threaten them?

while our mother’s brother, our uncle Cleobulus, the son of Glaucus of the deme Acharnae, was with Demaenetus of the family of the Buzygae, when he won the naval victory over Cheilon the Lacedaemonian admiral.

Again, when Archidamus the Laconian was ready to take over those posts and guard them, the Phocians refused his offer, answering him that it was the danger from Sparta that they feared, not the danger at home.

You are aware that it is for the advantage of Athens that neither the Thebans nor the Lacedaemonians should be powerful;

It is said that, when the Lacedaemonians were trying to overreach him, and offered any assurance he was willing to accept, Philocrates replied that the only possible assurance would be that they should satisfy him that, if they had a mind to injure him, they would not have the power;

and, remembering also that, when Philip was besieging Amphipolis, he pretended to be doing so in order to hand the place over to you, but that, when he had got it, he annexed Potidaea into the bargain, you will sh to have the same sort of assurance that, according to the story, Philocrates, son of Ephialtes, once opposed to the Lacedaemonians.

What transgression did the Phocians or the Lacedaemonians or you or anyone else commit after Aeschines’ speech, that the promises made by him to you then should not be fulfilled?

And so, men of Athens, as you stayed at home instead of taking the field, as the Lacedaemonians had discerned Philip’s treachery and withdrawn, and as no members of the Council were on the spot except the Thessalians and the Thebans, he really has proposed, with the utmost civility, to hand the temple over to them.

I am informed that he has become so proficient in effrontery and hardihood that he will disavow all his acts—his reports, his promises, his deceptions of the city—as though he were not on trial before a jury that knows the whole truth, and that he will denounce first the Lacedaemonians,then the Phocians, and then Hegesippus.

but after the death of Eurystheus they fixed their habitation among the Dorians.

and more people are in exile now from a single city than before from the whole of the Peloponnesus.

and Messene we received from the same people, in the same way, and by taking the advice of the same oracle.

Nevertheless, in this supervision the Athenians surpassed the Lacedaemonians no less than in the deeds which I have just mentioned.

The Spartans remained at the head of Hellas hardly ten years, while we held the hegemony without interruption for sixty-five years.

And the greatest proof of this is that those who then fought together took the hegemony away from the Lacedaemonians and conferred it upon our ancestors.

The Lacedaemonians were utterly destroyed.

and now they are laying siege to Olynthus and Phlius:

At that time the Lacedaemonians were indignant because we thought it right by legitimate means to extend our dominion over certain peoples.

The Pythia kept urging the Lacedaemonians, when they consulted her, to free Athens, until she prevailed upon the Spartans, although the Pisistratidae were their guest-friends;

but when he was defeated and killed, because Cineas the Thessalian came to the aid with a thousand horsemen, the Lacedaemonians, angered at what had happened, sent out their king Cleomenes with a larger force by land.

But when the Lacedaemonians would not listen, unless they also gave up the rule of the sea, they broke off the negotiations.

And something of this kind happened too in that greatest war which the Athenians and Lacedaemonians waged with the utmost contention against each other:

And the institutions of life differ so much that the Cretans and the Aetolians think brigandage honourable, the Lacedaemonians used to claim that all the fields were theirs which they could reach with a spear.

Terpander of Antissa first set melody to verse and put the laws of the Spartans into song;

And Lycurgus, who lived many years after the capture of Ilium, gives laws to the Spartans a hundred years before the Olympiads;

And they say too that the Argive women, with Telesilla the poetess leading them, merely by appearing routed the Spartans, valiant in war, and gained for those women fearlessness of death.

You know how it stood with our city in the last war with the Lacedaemonians when it seemed unlikely that you could dispatch a fleet.

or again, Conon from the sea-fight with the Lacedaemonians.

Now, he beat the Lacedaemonians in a sea-fight and took forty-nine warships;

The Thirty Tyrants are said to have borrowed money from the Lacedaemonians for use against the patriots in the Piraeus.

And afterwards, when peace, the peace of Antalcidas, was concluded with the Lacedaemonians, the latter requited their acts with exile.

Both parties seem to me to be in the wrong, men of Athens, both those who have supported the Arcadians and those who have supported the Spartans.

Yet as things now are, if one could cancel the fact of their being known and their using the Attic speech, many people, I believe, would think the one group Arcadians and the other Spartans!

nor does any occasion or means of effecting what is to their own advantage escape them;

The Lacedaemonians were no friends or benefactors of ours;

but it behoves the brave to set their hands to every noble enterprise, bearing before them the buckler of hope, and to endure gallantly whatever fate God may allot.

When the Lacedaemonians, men of Athens, had the supremacy of land and sea, and were holding with governors and garrisons all the frontiers of Attica, Euboea, Tanagra, all Boeotia, Megara, Aegina, Ceos, and the other islands, for at that time Athens had no ships and no walls, you marched out to Haliartus, and again a few days later to Corinth.

For when on the advice of Callistratus you undertook to aid the Lacedaemonians, he at that time opposed in the assembly the vote to do so, because he had purchased the right to collect the two per cent tax on grain during the peace, and was obliged to deposit his collections in the senate-chamber during each prytany.

— so, when peace was made in the archonship of Phrasicleides, and the battle was fought at Leuctra between the Thebans and the Lacedaemonians, this man Stephanus, having at the time come to Megara and having put up at Neaera’s house, as at the house of a courtesan, and having had intercourse with her, she told him all that had taken place and her brutal treatment by Phrynion.

The Plataeans, discovering that the Thebans had got within the gates in the night and that their city had been suddenly seized in time of peace, ran to bear aid and arrayed themselves for battle.

I recall also the evils which that power has brought upon Athens, upon the Lacedaemonians, and upon all the others.

The discourse which is to be submitted to you first was written at the time when the Lacedaemonians were the first power in Hellas, while our fortunes were at low ebb.

Again, what could be more patriotic or more serviceable to Athens than one which shows that by virtue both of our other benefactions and of our exploits in war we have greater claims to the hegemony than the Lacedaemonians?