Athens

For such as by war or sedi tion were driven out of the rest of Greece, the most powerful of them retired to Athens, as to a place of security;

) Whereas if the Athenians were to suffer the same fate, I think their power would be conjectured, from the appearance of the city to the eye, to have been double what it is.

And the Corcyraeans, on hearing of their preparations, were alarmed;

During these days also, and while Thrasyllus was in Athens, Agis made a raid from Decelea up to the very walls of the city;

Meanwhile a letter dispatched to Lacedaemon by Hippocrates, vice-admiral under Mindarus, was intercepted and taken to Athens;

During the course of it the Syracusan prisoners, who were immured in stone quarries in Piraeus, dug through the rock and made their escape by night, most of them to Decelea and the rest to Megara.

Reasonably, then, the winter there is mild.

For Attica, he said, has neither great mountains nor rivers flowing through it, as the Peloponnese and Thessaly have;

Diogenes of Sinope, when he was exiled from Sinope, came to Greece and passed his time sometimes at Corinth, sometimes at Athens.

These rose with Pisistratus and took the Acropolis;

The Athenians did, and by this means Pisistratus gained Athens for the third time, rooting his sovereignty in a strong guard and revenue collected both from Athens and from the district of the river Strymon, and he took hostage the sons of the Athenians who remained and did not leave the city at once, and placed these in Naxos.

The rest were Swinites, Assites and Porkites.

while Alcibiades, on account of his beauty, was hunted by many great ladies, and because of his influence at Athens and among her allies he was spoilt by many powerful men:

Obviously I should first entertain him when he came to Athens.

I remember that he once heard Criton say that life at Athens was difficult for a man who wanted to mind his own business.

The only remaining, and the necessary, policy was to resist with justice all his unjust designs.

Serrium, Doriscus, the sack of Peparethus, and all other injuries of our city—I ignore them utterly.

Was it, or was it not, right that some man of Grecian race should stand forward to stop those aggressions?

To turn their treaty of peace with a mortal man, a mere potentate of occasion, into a covenant of immortal ignominy for the commonwealth;

You saved the Lacedaemonians in old time, and those accursed Euboeans lately, and many other peoples, not because they were virtuous, but because their safety profited Athens, as that of the Phocians would today.

Citizens of Athens, I do not doubt that you are all pretty well aware that this trial has been the center of keen partisanship and active canvassing, for you saw the people who were accosting and annoying you just now at the casting of lots.

” King Theseus himself in Euripides speaks in very different terms of the Athenian Republic;

” Seneca, the writer already quoted, produces two instances, the one of Callistratus at Athens, and the other of Rutilius at Rome, who refused to be restored from banishment thinking it better for two individuals to suffer hardship, than for the public to be plunged into calamities.

Innumerable other instances of this kind might be produced from the highest authorities both ancient and modern.

When I was at Athens, scarcely one was found in a whole troop of youths — I see why you smiled, but the matter stands so.

And indeed we praise the Vulcan at Athens which Alcamenes made, in which, as the god stands clothed, a slight, not unsightly limp appears:

But since you do not dare (for now I will speak with Epicurus himself) to deny that the gods exist, what is there to hinder you from setting either the sun, or the world, or some everlasting mind among the number of the gods?

He becomes a mere hereditary general, as in Lacedæmon, a mere functionary, as the King Archon at Athens, or a mere formal hierophant, like the Rex Sacrificulus at Rome.

It is remarkable too that the “equality” of laws on which the Greek democracies prided themselves—that equality which, in the beautiful drinking song of Callistratus, Harmodius and Aristogiton are said to have given to Athens—had little in common with the “equity” of the Romans.

and, if we may judge them by the popular courts of Athens, of whose working we possess accurate knowledge, the Greek tribunals exhibited the strongest tendency to confound law and fact.

Moreover, you will find that these men are able to carry on a profitable business in Athens alone;

Indeed no one may rely on the honesty of his life as a guarantee that he will be able to live securely in Athens;

At the beginning of this oration I speak on the question of making peace with the Chians, the Rhodians, and the Byzantines;

As to their use of this power in general, I commend neither Athens nor Sparta;

first, is the fact that some are in the habit of recklessly denouncing our city;

and, lastly, there is the fact of my present age, which is such as to deter others from such an undertaking.

In this city, so ancient and so great, no man is free from the audit who has held any public trust.

how they have mustered their forces, and how they have gone begging up and down the market place, in the attempt to prevent the fair and orderly course of justice in the state.

that while the lawgiver, in case any one is subject to audit for a single office—though it be the least—does not permit him to be crowned until lie has rendered his account and submitted to audit, Ctesiphon did not hesitate to move to crown Demosthenes, who was holding all the offices in Athens at once.

—nor shall he prosecute men who have served as ambassadors, nor shall he be a hired slanderer— nor ever address senate or assembly, not even though he be the most eloquent orator in Athens.

Now if this trial were taking place in another city, and that city were the referee, I should have demanded that you should be my witnesses, you who best know that I am speaking the truth.

If a man at Athens not only abuses other people, but even his own body, here where there are laws, where you are looking on, where his personal enemies are on the watch, who would expect that same man, when he had received impunity and authority and office, to have placed any limit on his license?

Now when we presented the report of our embassy before the assembly, Ctesiphon came for ward first and spoke, including in his account the points that he was to make according to his agreement with Demosthenes, I mean about Philip’s social accomplishments, his personal appearance, and his doughty deeds at the cups.

But we, who have shrines and family tombs in our native land, and such life and intercourse with you as belong to free men, and lawful marriage, with its offspring and connections, we while at Athens were worthy of your confidence, or you would never have chosen us, but when we had come to Macedonia we all at once turned traitors!

On our return, then, after we had rendered to the senate a brief report of our mission and had delivered the letter from Philip, Demosthenes praised us to his colleagues in the senate, and he swore by Hestia, goddess of the senate, that he congratulated the city on having sent such men on the embassy, men who in honesty and eloquence were worthy of the state.

I left Athens for the report of your philosophy, passing over the schools there.

O Muses, and eloquence, and Athens!

Tell me, Basil, do you live in Athens and not know it of yourself?

This man transferred the school from Ionia to Athens.

Solon, then, gave laws to the Athenians, Pittacus to the Mitylenaeans.

The Greeks say that, after Orpheus and Linus and the most ancient of the poets among them, the first to be admired for wisdom were the seven called the Sages.

for that objection has already been partially stated, and you probably realize its force.

But perhaps he may object here that he framed his law in this way because the people are so easily gulled.

As it stands, then, this law reflects on your city not honor but disgrace, unworthy alike of your ancestors and of yourselves;

suppose he praised you and described your city to them in these words:

Now if I had not been chorus-master, men of Athens, when I was thus maltreated by Meidias, it is only the personal insult that one would have condemned;

On the contrary, laws were laid down by you before the particular offences were committed, when the future wrongdoer and his victim were equally unknown.

Athens, I am told,—that glorious city of a native race,—owns no aliens;

there did Phoebus force his love on Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, beneath the rock of Pallas, northward of Athens’ steep realm, called Macrae by the kings of Attica.

In Athens, when to my house he comes.

At Athens, the most nearly corresponding institution differed considerably from the Hindu form.

The daughter here becomes neither the true successor of her father nor the priestess of his worship, but a channel through which his blood passes to a male child, capable, according to the oldest notions, of sacrificing to him;

Under Athenian law, when sons have failed and the father has died intestate, daughters must be either married to kinsmen, or portioned by them under the system which I have described.

For seven years after he had killed Agamemnon he ruled in Mycenae, and the people were obedient under him, but in the eighth year Orestes came back from Athens to be his bane, and killed the murderer of his father.

She went to Marathon and to the spacious streets of Athens, where she entered the abode of Erechtheus;

"Then I saw Phaedra, and Procris, and fair Ariadne daughter of the magician Minos, whom Theseus was carrying off from Crete to Athens, but he did not enjoy her, for before he could do so Artemis killed her in the island of Dia on account of what Bacchus had said against her.

Now, first of all, that which was the first necessity of man’s nature was provided by our city;

And so they smoothed the way for those also who in a later time resolved to send out colonists and imitate our city;

Nor did our city, after she had played her part in bringing to pass the most important benefits, neglect what remained to be done;

Oedipus:

Athens I know, but not this place.

it is the ancient crown of the Great Goddesses.