Spartans

On the arrival of the men with Salaethus, the Athenians immediately put the latter to death, though he held out certain promises, and amongst others, that he would obtain the retreat of the Peloponnesians from Plataea (for it was still being besieged):

So when the Lacedaemonian commander was aware of their powerless condition, lie did not wish to take it by storm, (for such were his instructions from Lacedaemon, in order that if a treaty should ever be made with the Athenians, and they should agree to restore such places as they had respectively taken in the war, Plataea might not be given up, on the strength of its inhabitants having voluntaril …

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

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.

"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:

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.

Those allies who were dismissed went off in obedience to Leonidas, only the Thespians and Thebans remaining with the Lacedaemonians.

At present the Carneia was in their way, but once they had completed the festival, they intended to leave a garrison at Sparta and march out in full force with all speed.

The barbarians would see them fleeing and give chase with shouting and noise, but when the Lacedaemonians were overtaken, they would turn to face the barbarians and overthrow innumerable Persians.

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;

As for Epaminondas, on the other hand, when he considered that within a few days it would be necessary for him to depart, because the time fixed for the campaign had expired, and that if he should leave behind him unprotected the people to whom he had come as an ally, they would be besieged by their adversaries, while he himself would have completely tarnished his own reputation, — for with a larg …

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.

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.

On the following day, however, a messenger came with word that Syennesis had abandoned the heights, because he had learned that Menon’s army was already in Cilicia, on his own side of the mountains, and because, further, he was getting reports that triremes belonging to the Lacedaemonians and to Cyrus himself were sailing around from Ionia to Cilicia under the command of Tamos.

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;

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.

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

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?

The dates, fellow citizens, taken from the public archives, have been read and compared in your hearing, and you have heard the witnesses, who further testify that before I was elected ambassador, Phalaecus the Phocian tyrant distrusted us and the Lacedaemonians as well, but put his trust in Philip.

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.

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;

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

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.

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.

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?

Whatever he may say just now about the Phocians or the Lacedaemonians or Hegesippus,—that they did not receive Proxenus, that they are irreligious, that they are—anything he can say to their disadvantage,—surely all that was finished and done with before the return of the envoys to Athens, and therefore could not have stood in the way of the deliverance of the Phocians.

Nay, we must follow neither course, but must consider how we may carry on the war in a manner worthy of Spartans, and not prove those who are wont to eulogize our state to be liars, but so acquit ourselves that they shall seem to have told less than the truth about us.

With these allies I would far rather go to war than with multitudes of soldiers, for I know that those of our people who first came to this country did not prevail over their adversaries through numbers, but through the virtues which I have just set forth.

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

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 …

More than that, our city recovered her power in less years than it took to overthrow it, while the Spartans after their defeat at Leuctra have not been able even in a period many times as long to regain the position from which they fell, but are even now no better off than they were then.

but as it is, no such words occur to me other than those which are on the lips of all men, namely, that they so far outdid all those who lived before their time in lawlessness and greed that they not only ruined themselves and their friends and their own countries but also brought the Lacedaemonians into evil repute with their allies and plunged them into misfortunes so many and so grave as no one …

For we have reason to reproach the Lacedaemonians for this also, that in the interest of their own city they compel their neighbors to live in serfdom, but for the common advantage of their allies they refuse to bring about a similar condition, although it lies in their power to make up their quarrel with us and reduce all the barbarians to a state of subjection to the whole of Hellas.

It was against a king who had grown so proud, who had carried through such mighty tasks, and who had made himself master of so many men, that our ancestors and the Lacedaemonians marched forth, first dividing the danger:

the Lacedaemonians envying our city its victory at Marathon, and seeking to even the score, and fearing, furthermore, lest our city should twice in succession be the instrument of saving Hellas;

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 to the revolt of the Ionians from the alliance of the Lacedaemonians it was Aristides who urged them, watching for the moment when the Spartans were discredited because of Pausanias.

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.

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

Now history tells us that Themistocles bade his countrymen get on with the building and detain anyone who came from Sparta, while he went off himself on an embassy to the Lacedaemonians;

but when the great battle against the Lacedaemonians was fought near Corinth, and when the party in that city determined after the battle not to admit our soldiers within their walls, but to send heralds to greet the Lacedaemonians, these men, though they saw that Athens had lost the day and that our enemies were holding the pass, refused to betray us or to take steps for their own individual safe …

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!

I should like to ask them—and what I am about to say is not to become the signal for any tirade—just why, since they praise the Spartans in all other respects, they do not imitate the most admirable of all their practices, but rather do the very opposite.

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.

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.

The Lacedaemonians were no friends or benefactors of ours;

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 refused this offer and made answer that they would do nothing without the Athenians, whereupon the Lacedaemonians besieged them for two years, built a double wall about their city, and made repeated assaults of every conceivable sort.

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.

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

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?