Orationes 13
Orationes 13 Imperial Aelius Aristides GreekThere is an ancient law among the Greeks, and among most of the barbarians too, I think, to repay one's nurturers with every gratitude that lies within one's power. But what nurturers anyone could put forward as having come before you, men of Athens — anyone, that is, who claims in any way to be counted among the Greeks — it is not easy, as it seems to me, to discover. For in the first place, if one looked from the beginning, one would at once find that you are the namers and the providers even of this customary and common nourishment; so that it is possible to say that other men have other nurturers in their own right, whomever chance and the time that falls to each may furnish, but that you are the common nurturers of all, and the only ones, and earlier still than the nurturers themselves — like those whom the poets call fathers of fathers. For these reasons alone
it would have sufficed that goodwill toward you should exist among all men by nature. Yet that is not the nourishment I had in mind, looking to what is just, when I set out to speak of nourishment: I mean the truly pure nourishment, the nourishment that belongs to man above all, that which lies in learning and in discourse. Who is so far outside these things as not to know that their beginning, for all men, comes from you? So it is fitting to bring the discourse upon these matters here as well, and to honour the city with what is born of her. For the other expressions of gratitude are indeed just, yet they do not bear directly upon the deeds themselves; this alone may be called the genuine return for the benefaction. For the gratitude rendered through discourse in return for discourse not only carries justice with it, but also confirms the very name first derived from discourse, since it alone is, in the strict sense, "reasonable." Let none of you — whether you are present now at this discourse or will come to it in time — condemn the whole undertaking for rashness or simplicity, if, without setting before it some form meaner than the discourse, and without shrinking from the many laborious things that beset it, we have openly taken up so great a contest. For first of all — if this too deserves to be charged against us — not even in our duties toward the gods has it been left undone by us that the attempt was made. And then this has not escaped me either: how laborious the discourse is, how hard to carry through, and how many digressions it contains — all of which to take in together, to distinguish one by one, and to fill out to the end, is impossible without great and brilliant fortune. And besides this, against how many nations who have already spoken about these matters and pre-occupied men's ears do we advance, with the greater task of finding what to guard against rather than what to use.
For since different men have adorned different things and run through what was left open to all, all of it has been filled up; and it comes about that the contest is twofold for the one who undertakes it after all the others, separately against each and in common against all.
And yet this very thing is the one thing that has made me compose the discourse: that, while the city excels in so many great respects and has left no place idle for those who wish to praise her, no one to this very day has set himself to the whole of it, nor dared. Rather, some sing in their poems of the early times and of the city's common dealings with the gods — and that too only from what comes to hand; others recount in fragments the wars of particular occasions, against Greeks and barbarians; others again rehearse her constitution; and some in their funeral orations have named a few of the dead. And there are those who, even in these, did not — as is the custom — proceed through the deeds, but turned to another course, afraid, it seems to me, of falling short of the matters; and the fear they took on was not altogether beyond pardon, yet they fell so far short of going through all that the city possesses. Again, some praise her wisdom, others list her colonies, others hymn her openness and her humanity; and these too — some weaving the praise into their other writings, others delivering it offhand, just as memory chanced to serve. To put it simply, all have measured what concerns the city either by their own purpose or by their own power, not by the city's measure nor by the measure of her deeds, but as if before a boundless sea that
the eyes cannot encompass, each man marvels at as much as he can see. And the city has come to be like a riddle: where she abounds so greatly in fair fame and glory, there, even if one speaks of the very least of what she shares in, one will not wholly miss the mark. It is therefore not just to count the sole cause of my daring — that for which there was reasonable need of the present discourse — as belonging to that other cause whose name is blame. And further: if, among the many fair and great things that have raised the city to so high a station — things neither easy to count nor possible to measure — eloquence were also one good among them, it would perhaps not be fitting to run the risk, but rather to leave the matter of her glory however it happened to stand. But as it is, just as she has become the leader of all other things for the Greeks, and, I think, for the rest of mankind as well, so it is recognized that she is first also in discourse. So we are not making use of an experience that is foreign to her, nor have we chosen a road that leads elsewhere, but precisely to the city and to the Athenians; nor do we make the city's claims less, but we are repaying one of the city's own, so far as is possible. And though it has often been said by many that it is not easy to find where one should begin, I hold this saying to be mine, not another's, by reason of my need. For not only is the city, by being the oldest of those held in memory, such that her beginning reaches back beyond what is plain and ready
to grasp, but also the discourse displays many beginnings, as it were in a circle, which it is surely not possible to make all at once, nor easy to judge which beginning will prevail over the others; for each presents the appearance — at least so far as one can see from what shows itself — of being fitly spoken first, for the sake of something else.
The beginning which I take to be the most opportune of all, and the one in which I should least go astray as I set the whole discourse in order — this I will indeed make; and whether rightly or not, you may share in the judgment. And I think that if at any point I shall be seen to speak as though of my own concerns, as one who has a share in the good things, it would bring you no shame. For the nature of our land will appear to coincide with the nature of her men; the earth was not fit to belong to others — and so it never did — nor were the men worthy of any other land than this — and so they never exchanged it, but remained on the land they held. And both of these are judged by sight and by memory. For those who have ever dwelt in the land have brought forth clear and wonderful tokens of their own decency on every occasion that offered: displaying, on the one hand, what one might call humanity, in the gentleness of their ways and their dealings, leaving no others to seem equally civilized; and on the other hand, stationed in danger and in need before the Greeks, as a bulwark. And the very shape of the land is such, to one who views it from land and
from sea. For it lies forward in place of any other watch-post of Greece, holding the rank that falls to it, first toward the rising sun, stretched out into the open sea, and very plainly to be reckoned as a defence of Greece, made so by the higher powers; and it is by nature for this land alone to lead the race. Then it puts forth, as it were, a symbol of its humanity too: for it advances very far, taming the sea, and mingles with the islands — sweetest of sights, a mainland among islands, and further south than some of them — first stretching out, as it were, a hand to those coming from the open sea to receive them, providing harbours and havens of every kind in a circle all around it, and beaches in different quarters on the side both of the sea and of itself, and straits to the neighbouring islands that leave no greater gap than the islands leave between one another; so that one may sail along, sail round, go on foot, and even keep to the deep, passing through Attica as in a procession, choosing at one's pleasure what is agreeable. And the islands lie about, dappled on every side, the Cyclades and Sporades around Attica, as though the sea had let them up on purpose to serve the city as suburbs, preserving the figure of a chorus; and their beauties and ornaments have come to be the beauties and ornaments of the city. For they can do for her what the gateways do for a palace, and "stars enclose the moon," as a poet might say, bringing a greater gain than they provide — I mean, the gain of dwelling near her. And for these reasons one might say that to this city alone, properly
and genuinely, the dominion over them belonged in Greek affairs; while the others embarked upon the sea as bastards, like supposititious children, setting themselves not upon islands that were their fathers', but having seized them through the irrationality of fortune — the very thing that also quickly drove them out again.
Since the land has this shape and this position, it is not easy to tell with how much ease and delight and luxury the perpetual voyage in of merchants, and of those who arrive for inquiry or for need, takes place — except so far as one might call them to witness; for the soul is so wholly purified beforehand, and becomes lifted up and light, and altogether in readiness for the sight of Athens, as though being initiated beforehand in holy rites. And there is also, plain to the very eyes, a light greater than the usual that comes into them, since Athena even now removes the great mist, truly and as Homer says, as men still approach the land. So that the sights seem to unwind like the gladness of a dream, and you would think you were treading a dance, not completing a voyage, such are the beauties of every kind that ever stand round the ship in a circle, bringing it to Attica with good cheer. And what is told agrees with what is seen, things in which there is no room for disbelief; for everything is alike in order. For Leto — if it is fitting, even a little later, to tell of divine things — having loosed her girdle at Zoster in Attica, and left her name to the place, walking ever eastward, with Athena of Forethought leading, set out from the headland of Attica onto the islands and came down to Delos, and there indeed gave birth to the gods,
both Artemis and ancestral Apollo for the city. And the first force that crossed from Asia against the Greeks came through the islands and put in at Marathon, nobly led by the nature of the place to pay the penalty for what it had plotted against the Greeks. And though the land thus lies at the beginning of Greece, it is no less in her midst. For wherever you set out from her, the most renowned races of the Greeks receive you; and just as one's own land lies about a city, so all Greece lies about Attica. For this reason she alone has taken up the pretension of the Greeks purely, and is to the barbarians foreign in the highest degree; for by as much as she is separated by the nature of the place, by so much she stands apart in the character of her men. For she shares no river midway with anyone, nor has she any borderland that at once divides and mingles the soil; but as on a shield's device, all the Greek lands strain toward this central spot from every edge, and Greek circles enclose the land on every side, some lying about it from the sea, some from the mainland, as is fitting for the common hearth of the race. And so far has she fled the alien and barbarian that even on the opposite mainland she has thrown forward another Greece, a colony of her own, which now stands farthest of all from the barbarians — as though the city had been stationed there by nature, the rival and enemy of that race. From all this she has ever furnished her own people with a character guileless and pure and uncorrupted, and has brought in a speech sincere and pure and unoffending, a pattern for all Greek converse.
The same position belongs both to the land within Greece and to the city within the land — for she lies in the middle of the middle, inclining toward the sea only so far that her harbours, whose they are, may be seen. And a third thing follows upon these and rises up, conspicuous on high through the middle of the city — what was once the city and is now the acropolis, like a summit, not so as to be the last part of the city, but so that around it lies all the rest of the city's body, the top and the centre falling together at the same point — this is now the beauty that runs through the whole, and the final limit of the land's good situation. For just as on a shield, with the circles set one within another, the fifth, the fairest, fills all up to the boss, even so Greece is in the middle of all the earth, Attica in the middle of Greece, the city in the middle of the land, and again the city's namesake in the middle of the city. But here the discourse has carried us off, following the sequence that ever falls in its way; we must turn back again to the land and keep her precedence for her, whose nature, on the side of land and sea, we have described as fully as was fitting, avoiding length and yet not passing over what it were no worse to mention.
But indeed the air over her head and the tempering of the seasons she has obtained so well proportioned that, if one could have spoken of it in measured terms, it would have been a thing to pray for. For she stands at equal distance from all that is harsh, and, sharing in the good of each climate's power, she has escaped what is grievous in each. And one may judge of this not only by her crops that surpass even their name and hold sway over so great a part of the whole year, but also by distance, as by a measuring-line,
whenever we wish to see anything exactly. For however far one stands off from the city, moving this way or that, one meets with more heat than is needed, or with cold. So that she is outdone in this one thing only, in which to win is grievous and to be outdone is more profitable. And so great is her abundance of good fortune that even, among the other races, the cities that are her colonies, those that now hold Ionia, are thought to be best tempered, as though they had received some share of this too from home. So one would not say that part of the land is to the north and another to the south, naming them; nor again the remaining two in the same way; but, without the addition, one may define that on one side of her is the north already, on the other the south, and east and west as far apart as up and down, while she herself is, as it were, a borderland of all, a common ground in which all the divisions are blended together — under the very acropolis of heaven, so to speak, and under the rule of Zeus, being truly the portion of Athena, and a place proper to her works and her nurslings. For there is no air about the earth that stands so far from earth in nature, nor that is more like the upper aether. To this point, then, those craftsmen to whom these things belonged set Attica, in earth, sea, and air. And what follows for things of such a kind it is very easy to show — the beauties and graces of the plains: some spread out before the city straight from the wall, or rather from the acropolis, and mingled with the city; others lying along each stretch of sea upon the shores; and others in the interior, marked off by the surrounding mountains as by other boundaries, in the figure of certain gulfs of the sea. And
who would not admire the brightness and grace of the mountains? They have such abundance of ornament that they actually adorn the cities themselves; for what one would expect the land to have, being the work of the gods — a seed of the grace that comes from the gods — this it displays among the first things, and through its nature it furnishes that grace as host. And the land is most suited to the beauty of temples and statues, so that it would be twice the leader of these. For from here all these things took their beginning by custom, and the city has had from home the means to supply them. But indeed I do not know how to use my abundance, for it comes upon me to show even part by part the fitness of the land — as, for instance, the very fact that it is neither level throughout nor wholly mountainous, but is fashioned for the use of each in turn, and is varied; so that how could one not rightly say that it preserves, as it were, an image of the whole inhabited world, complete and entire? And further, the yoking and concord of sea and land through the harbours, and again the seasonable mingling and grace of plains and mountains, are not, I think, among the things that just happen anywhere. And one may see the veins of silver too, running like trickles of moisture through all the hill-country, so that no part of Attica should be idle, and nowhere should there be rough ground unprofitable to her revenues, but that this barren soil should outdo the rich soil of others. It was fitting, then, that this too should be provided to the city as a provision for freedom and for greatness of spirit. And then there are streams of ever-flowing rivers, gentle, and springs in abundance, and the bearing of all manner of fruits, of which the most cultivated of all is here, plainly, the fairest in the world.
But these things are like glorifying the feast by the dessert; the most proper and greatest fruit and ornament of the land, the one that gathers up all its fitness, I will now go through. Yet the beginning of my discourse has come down upon another beginning. For other lands elephants and lions adorn, others horses and dogs, others things that astound children who hear of them; but your land is adorned by the fairest of the things upon the earth — and one need not speak of it in the manner of the winged ants among the Indians. For she first bore man and is the first fatherland of man; and what the whole earth is to all the land-living creatures, that this land has conquered the right to be for the race of men: a mother and common nurse and starting-point of nature, a place proper to men, set apart out of all the earth, like the boundaries of sacred precincts. For this reason she has borne men in all things the best and risen highest in the virtue that comes to be, since the bearing was native to her, not imported. For they did not put an end to wandering, nor, as if in darkness seeking a fatherland through all land and sea, nor under the lead of two misfortunes, take hold of the land, forcing the name upon it, yielding to the stronger and casting out the weaker; but, as the water from springs comes up out of the bosom of the earth, so the race came up, taking its beginning from itself; and to this land alone is it fitting that stranger and citizen be distinguished. For others, having seized their lands as men seizing seats at a spectacle, so judge these matters, marking off the rest not because the places belong more to themselves than to others,
but because they got there first; and they call those who came later strangers, not knowing that all alike are strangers — or rather that they themselves are the first strangers, and differ from the made-citizens, whom they themselves make, only in this: that, not having been judged worthy of citizenship, but having forced their way in, they put forward the fatherland before them, using what came to hand as men do for want of weapons. But to you alone it belongs to boast of a pure nobility and citizenship. And of two names each holds good for the land by reason of the other — and reasonably. For the strangers are bound by the name on account of the others, the genuine citizens; and the citizens confirm the name by being, from the beginning, pure of strangers. So that against you alone, if one may say so, would not a single man win a suit of eviction from the land — no more than from one's mother. And accordingly only those who become made-citizens here are free from mockery; for since all of you are by nature citizens of the land, you have by law assigned the honour to others. But of the rest the most run the risk of being bastards adopting bastards, having corrupted their ancient nature by time, living as though in a common lodging on the whole earth, the last comers calling, in their rounds, that their own which others dwelt in. And one might say, I think, begging off envy, that the others inhabit their cities as men inhabit camps, holding to the places they have seized; but to the descendants of this land alone the city belongs by right, and she alone of cities — or at least among very few — justly assigns an unshaken hearth, a prytaneion.
But while many things flow in and all press me to speak each of them, I choose to set forth in order what is second in nature and to confirm
what is before it. For when the land had sent up the men, she adorned and furnished their life, doing the works of a mother, and did not look on while they had need of a nurse as of one belonging to others, but bestowed the second gifts from the same bosom. And there came to be a festival truly sacred, on behalf of all the inhabited world, here in this place, and as in a spectacle all things were set to a contest. The earth was strong for all kinds of bearing, and the gods, bringing their gifts together, provided — some plants, some seeds, some herds — whose produce was to adorn the body of man no less than its own, and to furnish a covering shared in common, to some the annual and ever-renewed, to others such as it could reach. And on top of these they showed forth the arts, some by combining them with fire, some without fire. And yet these things bring to the city distinction and grace not only by reason of the multitude of those who were born and appeared here, but they are also exceedingly great proofs of the first proposition, and clearer than anything else, that man first stood upon this earth; and it comes about that the same things at once excel in number and stand in order, one after another, as signs of the truth. For those who were the first to be born had to be the first to feel need, and having felt need, had also to obtain; and this, at least, was impossible unless they were dear to the gods; and that those first judged worthy to be born should be dear to the gods — how is this not reasonable? For it comes round again to the same point. And indeed it is likely that the gods, for both reasons, filled the earth with bearing for them: partly for need, since, as I said, it overtook the first men in this land; partly for the honour owed to the best. And having received the gifts of the gods, they so well imitated the givers that
they themselves were established for the rest of mankind in place of the gods, and gave this first proof of having obtained their portion worthily: that they used what they had as was fitting. For they did not think it enough to hide this very thing in the earth, but were so far from fearing lest they make the others equal to themselves, that they held nothing finer than to show by how much they excelled the rest, than if they should be seen doing good to all. And it seems to me that Heracles too, later, making this city the pattern of his life, took up that purpose on behalf of all mankind which has set him among the gods. And the clear sign of this is his friendship with Theseus, surpassing by far not only the friendships of those men toward others, but all friendships whatsoever formed between any persons in fellowship. In return for which, again, this city first of cities honoured him with the honours of the gods, and alone preserved his children. But the discourse, carrying me like a torrent, has borne me off by force; it is time, then, to return to the point from which I set out.
They send, with a divine procession, the means of livelihood over all the earth, as though they had appointed, like a distribution of festival-money, one of the nurslings of Demeter, as it is told; and the report prevailed that the chariot was winged, because it went everywhere faster than hope, and nothing was steep or impassable to it, but it was carried as through the bare air. And they seem to me to have been the first to confirm in deed that other saying too, that acts of grace are by nature swift; for in doing good they outran the desire of those who needed to receive good. And as a memorial and symbol of that divine procession and of the benefaction toward all, there are the first-fruits of the crops that come here from the Greeks each year, as in former times. And further, there are the god's oracles, by which he names the city the mother-city of the crops, bearing witness to both: that she both holds the crops first and that they came to the others from her. And she also first of all cities established games, and the prize from her benefactions, fairly giving warrant for what was bestowed. And how could those men not truly
- be children of the gods, and nurslings of the gods, and ancestors of the common life for all mankind? They who, after such honour came to them from the gods, left fairer things still to their own descendants to take pride in, having shown themselves such toward the gods who gave, and having so dealt also with the rest of mankind. And this part, ending here, has been completed for us in full; what comes next carries, like a road, two and more divisions, each following on what has been said — but to speak in turn whether they preserve their succession one with another is not yet clear.
It is perhaps best to go through the divine matters first, and then in this way to discourse of their other virtue as well; and further, of what they wrought, both by themselves and in fellowship, in each successive age. But I shall take up a little. For not only by the things I have mentioned did the gods honour the land for you, but by many other great things, and by the greatest, which alone perhaps would have sufficed to mention: for concerning this city alone of all cities under the sun the foremost of the gods contended, and seized the acropolis as if for a monarchy, so to speak. And of this honour they displayed a second no less great, when they entrusted the judgment to the very men who then held the land, thinking it a graceful and light thing to be judged on both sides by their favourites. And when the tokens appeared on either side, the surge and the olive-shoot, Athena wins and shows that the olive-shoot is a symbol of victory; and Poseidon withdrew, yet did not give up his love. And the second tokens of the zeal and honour of both are no less: for the one gave the city to conquer by wisdom, the other to conquer in sea-battles not only their adversaries, but those who shared the same craft — and, I think, all who have ever had naval contests and victories. But the discourse upon these matters comes next
at once. Receiving the votes, the goddess gives her own name to the city as being her own, and furnished it as her own possession, sufficient for both peace and war: first by revealing discourse and the ordering of laws and a constitution free of despotism. From these all learning was discovered, and patterns of life came in. Next, by teaching the use of arms and adorning the people first in the figure in which we now adorn her image; and further she showed forth the vehicles of racing-horses and war-horses. And in this land the consort of this goddess first of men yoked the finished chariot together with the goddess, and showed to all the perfected art of horsemanship. After these, choral dances and rites and festivals prevailed, one after another, through the visits of various gods. For upon the honours of the gods there followed the gifts, as they gave and received from one another what fell to each. And not only did the gods contend with one another on the city's behalf, but the matters over which they contended with one another they brought to judgment in this very city, turning all men everywhere toward the city, and willing to lay down with her the beginnings and patterns of all things — as those who teach children beforehand do — so that, just as it is well for the emulous everywhere when the foremost have taught beforehand, so those gods too might come out perfect in the virtue that comes to be, following those whom they ought; and so that the seeds among them might be not only of wheat and barley, but also of justice and of all the rest of their manner of living and constitution from the gods. And Poseidon goes to law with Ares concerning his son, and wins among all the gods; and the place takes its name accordingly, the same name as a symbol of what befell and as, so to speak, another testimony and pledge of justice among men. For one cannot find anything above the Areopagus, if one seeks an extreme. But as the waters that have prophetic power and the winds draw their strength from the spot itself, so too
this place seems, as it were, to send up the knowledge of justice clear and as near as possible to that which is among the gods. And it is so honoured by all for what it has conceded that even the defeated are content as much as the victors; and all magistracies and councils, and what is greatest, the people, all private men, yield to the judgments given in this place. And the change that befalls human things has almost alone not touched this spot; but, as a place of contest, it has been dedicated to the gods and to those to whom it descends from them, and all, accounting it a pattern of justice, honour it so, out of reverence for the gods. And another judgment takes place later, a mixed one as regards the contestants, but divine also in its judges, which a man of the line of Pelops, in his misfortune, contends against the dread goddesses who now dwell near the place — having fled for refuge and given, as it were, an appeal to the city, on the ground that here, if anywhere, is just humanity — and, obtaining the goddess, he is freed from his madness.
Concerning race, then, and nourishment, and the honour from the gods, and the gifts which they both found out for themselves and dealt to others, it has been said — perhaps less than the deeds deserve, yet not less than by those before us. But now, with all manner of things coming in, it is perhaps fitting to speak of those of which a part has been written into what has been said: with what great and what kind of abundance of humanity they used toward all, and how they conducted their public life for the common good. And here too I go back a little. For just as it did not suffice the gods to show their goodwill toward the city in some single way, so neither did those men judge it enough to share grain with mankind, but they went forward on the road, increasing their ambition, like those who plant seeds. And the greatest and most common of their benefactions is the receiving and consoling of the unfortunate from every quarter. For there is no race of Greece, so to speak, that has not had trial of this city, nor that has been left homeless in
its hour of need; rather, both cities and nations have removed to her and taken refuge there, and individually almost all the most renowned men — of all of whom it is impossible both to make mention first and to render words proportionate to the memory: I mean not those who came over privately in their misfortunes, but not even those who came in common. But of the old cases, the most honoured and, as it were, a fitting beginning to relate to most people: when Heracles had departed from among men, the city is the first to set up temples and altars for him, just as before she had first honoured strangers with the mysteries. And from that time he continues to be, and to be held, a god. For not only was she the first to begin honouring the eldest of the gods — and that beyond measure and above all who came after — but she also enrolled the newcomers along with the other gods, as though sharing citizenship with the gods. For at the same moment those gods were receiving him, and this did not escape her notice; rather she expounded it to the rest of mankind and proclaimed it aloud, so that she revealed both that the Thebans were but slightly akin to him by nature, and likewise the others who have any share in him, as being his own in memory. For she alone knew of whom he was worthy. To him, then, she had rendered this favour; and on this account one might justly call all the favours that Heracles received from others favours of the city; for all, in imitating her, agreed upon what is just. And when Eurystheus had driven his children out of the Peloponnese, and added another, still greater and more terrible, piece of insolence — proclaiming beforehand that none of the other cities should receive them either, and threatening the utmost — all the rest were indignant, but had no means of helping; the city alone of all received them, hating the threats rather than fearing them, and the protection which Heracles had held over all mankind she herself preserved for his children, like a contribution to a common fund — and reasonably. For in most of his labours he had been aided through Theseus, and
she had long held him a partner, ever since she saw that he held the same views as herself. And what she accomplished with them and on their behalf it is fitting to set forth in another part of the discourse; but at any rate she made the guardianship of them so brilliant that the very misfortune profited them. For not only did she make their orphanhood unfelt, becoming a father to them in place of their father, but she also honoured them, as benefactors of mankind on their father's side, by giving them four of the cities then inhabited in the land to dwell in, and by being the first to rear them at public expense — children of a benefactor father — just as later she resolved to rear the children of those who died in war. And indeed she received fitting wages of nurture for herself; for she found them worthy of the deeds done. And their road hither became afterward the common road of all the exiled — or rather, on top of many earlier cases these too took refuge. For the city offered herself common to all in need from the very beginning, and all the Greeks were thought to ride at two anchors, holding it true: each privately naming their ancient fatherland, but all in common naming this one their fatherland, and holding the former second, the latter first in importance. For so much more secure and profitable did they reckon this one to be for themselves, as it was more unconquerable and truly sacred, and this they came to know through experience, deliberating rightly: on the one hand those about Thebes who met misfortune and were driven out with all Boeotia; on the other, those of the Thessalians who turned this way, and those of the Tanagraeans who removed when the Dorians had mastered the Peloponnese, driven out by those who had yielded to them — and these were all Ionians. And she did the same toward those from both coasts, the western and the eastern; for both these and those, in their
necessities, she received. And there are some races of the Greeks now wholly departed elsewhere whom she took up when they took refuge with her, like the Dryopes and the Pelasgians; of whom even now signs of their preservation remain. For the names derived from them are at once a token of their dwelling and of their preservation. And having from of old given herself to all, she kept her resolve to the end like a law, and went through all the crises of Greek history, opening her gates a little to all who fled from wars, or from civil strife, or from any other fortune, proclaiming from afar that they should take courage, since no one of the Greeks should be without a city so long as the city of the Athenians should exist — unless those to whom it should fall should change their fatherland. When one of the three portions in the Peloponnese, that of the Messenians, was destroyed, she alone preserved the rest of them, both receiving them and considering places in which they might settle. And now there are Messenians because of the city. Again, when the disaster about Boeotia took place, and the city that had once offered itself to the Greeks to prosper among them was unexpectedly and undeservedly destroyed, no others remembered them in their need or lightened their lot; but while the portion belonging to the rest came to an end — the race of the Plataeans — the city, with fair grace, set their misfortune right for them, declaring them Athenians instead of Plataeans, and preserving the memorial for the place, as was fitting for her who then stood as the common champion of all; and those of the men there who had stumbled, the conspicuous ones, she set upright again. Again, when the Thebans were ill-treated by the Laconian garrison, she received the people, and the exiles spent that time as Athenians, until they were to recover their own through the city. And again she receives the Plataeans, expelled a second time, and the Thespians along with them, household and all. And again the Thebans, in their
uttermost misfortunes, and before these those on the Thracian coast who fared badly — what was left of two and thirty cities, those from Corinth and Thasos and Byzantium and from everywhere — who could count them? I think it is not easy even to count those from the islands alone. For she alone, so to speak, has continued contending against the fortune of all, trying to turn the disasters of all to the other side, and she has reversed the proverb; for she did not show that one should keep clear of a friend who has fared badly, but has made friends, even of many formerly at variance with her, upon their misfortunes. Nor has she used men while they prospered and dishonoured those who came off badly, measuring her humanity by fortune; rather she has made the seasons of others' ill-fortune into occasions for doing good, adding her own benefits to the many and making them partners in things which, when they fared best, they had not even hoped for. And indeed all men, in every season of need, have seen this one road, the one that leads here. And being the eldest of the Greek cities, more by receiving men from every quarter than by having anticipated others in the antiquity of her race, she is, as it were, a fatherland and common hearth. And her fitness toward all she showed not only by those whom she sent forth from herself, but also by furnishing her ground to those who fled to her from outside, and admitting all as a part of herself.
This, then, is one such and so great a kind of benefaction, following upon what went before; and there is another, which both follows upon the matters in order and falls short in nothing in greatness: for, taking to herself the common interpreter of the Greeks, who was also her ancestral god, Pythian Apollo, she led out the Greek race over all the earth, making it at once a guard and an increase to the nation. And first she purged the surrounding sea — though I seem not to be naming the first of her deeds — and, as it were, took the rheum
from the eye of Greece, raising up the troublesome folk at her very doors — I mean all the pirates and barbarians — and forcing them to withdraw as far as possible from the Greek seaboard and the entrances. From this the circle of islands was firmly settled, and through the most civilized of them it became possible to sail the Aegean, two and three cities at a stretch, as though changing from one island to another on a mainland here and there — so well did she order the sea. Besides this, she settled the islands lying off the Peloponnese, making the western regions her own and warding off the barbarians on every side, as with bulwarks; and when the guard of Greece had been provided for her from two quarters, and shut up as in closed harbours, then she went on even beyond her borders through the sea, and carried over into Asia her many great colonies, joining the land as though it were one by nature, and the parts beyond Greece as not separated, until she made the coast facing Asia, if one may say so, a prow set against the old Greece — increasing by a great share the possessions of the Greeks, and providing greatly beforehand for the common safety, as the time to come showed. And she set the fairest ornament about both races, not only by the number and the seasonable choice of land, but also by showing of how many and what good things concord is the cause. And with this, as a foundation or root laid beneath, the colonies of the Greeks went forth through all the earth. For upon those sent out and prevailing there falls a longing to imitate the mother-city. And dividing the land among themselves, they settled it, extending Greece like another measure, until they filled up all that could receive them. And now at both ends of the earth the children of your children dwell: some reaching from Massalia as far as Gades, others parted off about the Tanais and the marsh. So that laughter comes upon me when I hear the cities of today taking pride in their own ornaments and thinking themselves splendid, when I find on inquiry that earth and
sea have been adorned by your city — apart from many other and far greater things. This, then, I wish, going back briefly, to examine and to show: the continuity of the policy which the city has used toward the Greek race, and that no better title can be applied to her than the one I just now uttered. For when the children of Heracles needed help, she alone furnished it and gave them a share in all, surpassing the need by her greatness of spirit. And when the Peloponnese had to become the Dorians', she brought them down again, together with the god. And when the return of the Heraclidae and newer events took place in the Peloponnese, again she received those who were displaced. In this the cases of the former suppliants stood secure, while others now had taken on their condition. And having by now received all mankind, and given them a share of her land and laws and constitution, she devised, on behalf of Greece, to use her advantage, and to make the many cities that had taken refuge with her a starting-point for many great cities abroad. And yet how could the city have deliberated more humanely, or more brilliantly, concerning those who gave themselves to her? She who first shared her own land and constitution, then helped them procure another, judging it right to receive those in need both for the home country and for the foreign one, and observing what was fitting for each occasion. For when they were weak, she took away their fear and set right their straits; but when they had fared better than misfortune warranted, then she ordered them and sent them forth, setting leaders over each, just as she herself had become common leader and guardian of all, and joining a people of her own to them. And these things one would find continuous not only in deed but also in purpose. For just as, having received the former, she brought them down — the Heraclidae, I mean — so too, having first received those after them, she then led them forth, setting a double
benefaction in place of a single one in both cases. And going forward thus, ever from the first to the last, the city's forethought on behalf of the Greeks resembles, as I said, a constitution, and is preserved through a long and continuous succession. And indeed, the receiving of fugitives — even if this too does not escape being a proof of common humanity — yet one might say it was doing good only to those who had had trial of that fortune. But the founding of colonies is a common gain for the Greeks, not only for those who departed. For they added to the common stock many great cities and lands and powers, by which they became not a little greater. Thus I say that the city's sending forth from herself is no less a part of the favour she shows toward the Greeks than her taking in of those in need. And indeed it has come about that only with this city does one win good repute even through opposites. For the same men are the oldest of the other Greeks, and in many places are reckoned among the new Greeks — just as men paint Dionysus. Having come from nowhere, but sprung up from the soil itself, they received those who needed a city from every quarter; and having received men from everywhere, they have also sent men everywhere, preserving in this too what is fitting in order. For it is likely that the descendants of the oldest should be most numerous, more than those of any others; and to receive those in need belongs to the stronger. And indeed, by distributing grain in the beginning, how is this not the same thing as sending out the swarms of colonies and settling the earth — especially when it was now possible for all to work and to set up their livelihood more easily because of the resources provided?
But now there follows what has long been the awaited portion of the discourse — as it seems to me, and to many — the deeds done amid dangers, which I fear may carry more danger for the speaker in the telling than for the city in the deeds when she was at work upon them. Yet it is necessary to take hold of these too
for two reasons: first, that having sufficiently recalled the goods of peace and the things by which she furnished our life, it was surely fitting not to pass over the deeds done in other seasons as well — especially as they are more in number than those of all the rest together, and greater than all that we have received in report; and second, because the examination of the deeds done in war coincides with the whole humanity of the city which we have just finished going through, so that for us the beginning comes round again from the end. Indeed, one would scarcely find that the colonies themselves escaped this part of the discourse. For not without great contests, nor without prevailing everywhere, did these come about either. But I return to where I left off. Not only, then, by her other gifts, nor by her care and protection of those who fled to her, nor by the things in which, as we said, she increased the Greek race, has the city brought forth for us clear proofs of her virtue and greatness of spirit toward all; but there is no contest which, when it was needed, she shrank from, but she proved better toward those in need than they themselves advised. And from the point where we just now began to examine her whole humanity, let that be for us now the beginning of the deeds done amid contests too: the Peloponnesians with Eurystheus, whom she repelled, with how great a superiority, on behalf of the Heraclidae, and how she reversed the matter. For the man whom no city, no man, no race among the Greeks could withstand — and who had such excess of power that he could threaten threats common to both the children of Heracles and the cities: against the former, if they should show themselves; against the latter, if they should receive them — this man she brought to such a pass that he did not even obtain burial at home, and the city found, as he deserved, the end of that license which Eurystheus had enjoyed beyond his desert. And that man, then, committed his outrage only at an opportune moment; for, trusting in his resources, he paid the penalty. And this deed was decided in Attica, and through the preservation of the suppliants she freed the whole
Peloponnese, which was in worse case than they, inasmuch as the one party was forbidden to take refuge, the other to receive — so that the one found safety through the city, while the other had no way not to do what was commanded. But before this another deed of the city takes place in the heart of Boeotia — and very much a deed of the city — which, to hear it and by the need of the suppliants, those men of that time accomplished on behalf of the Argives, but which in truth, and by the form of the benefaction, was wrought on behalf of the whole nature of mankind. For when they heard that those who had met misfortune beneath the Cadmea had been cast out unburied, they did not fear the insolence of those who had dared this, nor advance as men deliberating about what they would do should they prevail; but, granting the hope of victory to the consciousness of being the better men, and taking on the anger as though they themselves had suffered it, they rendered, on behalf of the common law, to the one party the honour, to the other the punishment, as was fitting. And indeed this very thing first — that all who are in need of help take refuge with the city, as truly as upon two feet, and look to none of the other cities — is a great and clear token, and better than any monument, of her excelling from the very beginning, and not merely in some hidden way; and a witness of the two fairest things, courage and humanity — or, if you will, I say justice in place of humanity. For all these men have become, as it were, heralds about her, and have made their proclamation from the very deeds: that none care for justice more than the Athenians, nor are better at preventing whatever is done outside what is honourable; but that the other cities, needing the Athenians, in themselves merely fill up a number for Greece, while she, truly like a city standing among places, is at once like in her furnishing and her counsels, stronger than those who honour justice, more reasonable than those who hold power — or rather, more exact, toward the very account of justice, than those who honour justice, and, in the end, more able at forcing than those who set themselves to force; so that by both
she conquers both kinds through both. Let these things, then, stand as common proofs, as I said, of courage and of humanity, selected from the ancient deeds. But indeed what they displayed on behalf of their own land against those who attacked it from time to time — of this, I think, no one is ignorant; yet some few of these too must be set forth and brought to hand. For the Amazons, who in their deeds outran their nature, they joined battle with on horseback and destroyed in utter ruin, when none of all up to Attica withstood them, but they had already made the continents equal, setting out as from a starting-point from the Thermodon, stretching out Asia as far as Lycia and Caria and Pamphylia, as in a camp, and Europe as far as the camp before the city. From there everything, as when a cable breaks, gave way backward, and for the Amazons their rule and their course were dissolved; and the city here too came to the aid of the common nature, and now it has come to an incredible thing whether they ever existed at all. And I think the Thracians too did not blame themselves for their misfortune, who came here still earlier with Eumolpus, together with those of the Greeks who chose their side, and learned that they had deliberated much as if they were attempting to cross the sea on foot. It is fitting, moreover, to add this also, which is omitted by most of those accustomed to speak at the public tomb: that not only has the city's common eagerness and strength been so great in all that is needed, but that here too certain men have appeared willing, in their private capacity, to make use of misfortunes on behalf of the common good — and very reasonably. For the way in which they saw their fatherland deal with the Greeks, in that same way they thought they themselves ought to bear themselves toward their fatherland, whenever the occasion called; so that, both from the public and from the private side, the city's whole ambition was double. And what is greater still than this, is that even certain of the strangers were so disposed toward her. For it is said that Erechtheus, in this war against Eumolpus, gave up his daughter on behalf of the city,
at the god's command; and his mother adorned her and led her forward, as though sending her to a festival. And Leos, having resolved the like to this, also gave up his daughters in the plague. And Codrus, in the war against the Dorians and the Peloponnesians, himself willingly died on behalf of the land. So that even those who have such things to relate of their own can say nothing more than what is found among you; rather the city leads even in such deeds, through so many and yet more examples, and is left behind in no superiority either common or private. It has not, then, befallen the city that, while in everything else she has not in a single point been worsted, nor in any of the enemies she has overcome, she should yet, in the favour owed to those of her own who held these resolves on her behalf, be left behind; but she will be seen to have conquered even these by her benefactions: giving to Codrus the rule for his children, and adorning his line both with her and abroad; and to the maidens establishing shrines, and deeming them worthy, by the honours, of a divine portion in place of a mortal one; and declaring Erechtheus a fellow-throned with the gods on the acropolis.
And let these things have been carried up to this point in our discourse, as proofs of the ancestors' humanity toward those outside, and of their good courage on their own behalf in pressing crises, and again of how the distinguished and the many dealt with one another. But it is right perhaps to recall the rest too, so far as is possible, examining what was accomplished on behalf of others and what they undertook on behalf of their own land, however it may fall in with the discourse, so as not to carry the deeds far out of their order in time. And as you hear, it is possible from the deeds themselves to distinguish the common from the private. If, then, the discourse were about some other city, it would not be possible to pass over the deeds we shall now need to mention, but these alone would have sufficed to tell; for they are such as one would have sought, and many would buy for themselves, if they could, at much money. But as it is,
since the finding of what one must leave out and the speaking worthily of the prevailing deeds stand on an equal footing, and since no one in even a bare narrative has yet gone through them all, while most men have spoken more on behalf of this one city than of all others — or rather, more on behalf of her alone than of nearly all the rest together — it is not possible to go through each thing exactly, but it is necessary to leave out the most, in order to use the greatest. For who would not gladly have brought into the midst even those things which would have sufficed others by themselves? When three of the greatest nations among the Greeks attacked the city, the one departed having sentenced itself to exile — the Dorian; the Boeotians were beaten in hand-to-hand fight, and on the same day the Euboeans in Euboea: so great was the city's superiority. But, that I may not, by telling many such things, go far from the occasion, leaving out all the middle and using even this very thing as a proof of the city's greatness of spirit, I will turn to the very heart of the discourse. For when the affairs of Greeks and barbarians were being decided, and a small part of the earth contended against a great one, and the contest was at once for safety and for virtue, then the city conquered both races more nobly than one could have prayed for: so that the one was shown to be a small addition to her, the other worse in proportion as it seemed greater. Now one may also lay the cause of the whole deed upon one of the gods, willing to make a kind of judgment of the men under him and to arrange this contest, as we who are accustomed to do — yet none the less the virtue of the city contributed no small part, and very reasonably and with worthy account of the fortune that was to come. For as though for this purpose stirring up the barbarians — that she might display herself and the whole Greek race, and show who she was and over whom she presided — so she drew them on, furnishing not an unjust beginning, nor, like those who later crossed into Asia from desire of more,
but already then defending herself and claiming to take vengeance for the Greeks on the mainland of the Ionians who had been enslaved, whom she alone had received when they were perishing throughout all Greece, and she alone had set in their proper place. And first of the Greeks down to that time they went up to Sardis with a common army, sacked it, and departed; whereas till then the Greeks, ranked with Babylon and with the Indies, had wondered at Sardis. Taking this as a pretext, Darius could not keep quiet, but reviewed his empire and mustered his forces, and everything was a small thing to him. And the show of it was this — to take vengeance on the Athenians and the Eretrians; for he made the Eretrians an addition, that it might be believable. But two things in truth were moving him: one, fear already and suspicion of the city, lest she should think nothing enough; the other, a desire and longing to increase his empire by the glorious addition of Greece, and to rule the earth not in divided parts, but the whole. And this was not altogether without hope for him, because of the multitude of nations already enslaved, which he took pride even to know by name, and which it was beyond hope to traverse in a bare march. For everything then followed the Persians, as though unable to live otherwise. Holding, as I said, a middle place between fear and desire, he came to a decision. For he himself gave up crossing, but planned to send the nations.
And first, the circuit of the heralds that was made throughout Greece, by him and by the king after him, concerning earth and water, began from this city, and all dealings were addressed to her; and in the Greek letters, and in all the frequent dispatches that went to the satraps, there was nothing but Athens, as though to say "the city of the Athenians" were the same as to say "Greece" — and not only to say it, but as a thing answering in fact, that one would hold all the cities if one held this. And indeed all that
they had to use against these, and to plan beforehand concerning the whole, the city examined, from the beginning ranking herself before the Greeks. And from two sides now, from the Persians and from the Athenians, the war was being struck up — the one threatening and making trial, the other standing against him and conquering at once by her replies. And from both these it was attested that the war was between Athenians and Persians, over Greece — the one trying to take it, the other to prevent it. In those crises, indeed, deeds were worsted by words — I mean the deeds of others by your words — and a decree prevailed for memory above a trophy, conquering at once in word and deed. For at once it was effective in their hands, not only by the show of hands, as is the law, but also by the destroying of the messengers. And to the one who had interpreted the writing they assigned a vote, that, since after all he was a Greek, he might have the more the image of a trial; but they killed him too, on the ground that the barbarians ought not to be served even as far as a voice. And his strength turned against him; for they did not think it right that the city's own colonist should become, against the city and the Greeks, an interpreter for the natural enemy. And so they cast him into the pit, so that others should report the answers to the king, and that it should not be possible to learn them from those who had been sent. And he indeed was now stirring brilliantly, and on the one hand he ordered his satraps to make ready then and there fetters, more than he supposed the Athenians to be, that none of them should escape unbound — enjoying his anger while he could; on the other, he laid different commands on the multitudes, on different peoples. After this heralds no longer went to Greece, but he sent down the expedition now self-announcing, setting over it the best of the Persians as commanders, and gives a multitude of an army. The difference of which, from one set of leaders to the next, is so great that it constitutes the greatest standard of an armament — wishing to leave no excuse, neither
to them nor to himself, for not doing what he commanded. And this was: to sink the city beneath the sea, and to bring the whole race to himself in the manner I have already described. Such, then, was the state of the king's wrath and preparation; and they were borne along, drowning out the Aegean with their din, robbing those they met of their sight, filling the sea with flight — so that there was no one who would have wished then to dwell on an island. And while they were still on the voyage and a little before the landing, it seemed good to make a first-fruits of the king's commands and to sing, as it were, a prelude of the war; and so resolving, they fell upon the Eretrians and went off carrying them away, having imitated a fishing-net at sea. And the Eretrian race was thus snatched up as though seized by some other of the higher powers; and the rest went on against the second, as though to drag up the Athenians themselves and snatch away Greece — ill knowing what manner of hunt they were pursuing, and that they were not subject to the saying that they were chasing what flees, but rather what is wont to do the chasing.
When matters had gone thus, and they were borne toward the mainland like some other evil out of the sea, all the other Greeks — both having long foreseen the crossing and now already seeing it — sat in consternation, looking off to what was to come, each dreaming of the disasters of the Eretrians, and reckoning themselves to be as far from the terrors as their army was. But the city resembled one conducting a procession rather than one arming for a contest. For she opened all her temples, and gathered the families of the priests, and sent embassies to the gods in the ancient manner, calling them as allies and making them her leaders. And when the divine had been duly attended to by her, nothing more was left idle, but the guardians of the temples and the old men of the city were
left behind, while the youth went forth. And first they put to shame the racers in the crowned games; for by as much as they contended for fairer prizes, by so much did they furnish a more wonderful eagerness. Then at the last they were stronger than at the gates. And yet, when they were still halfway in their march, there struck them, like a wind off the sea, a shout mingled of horses and men and of the other baggage brought along with the army — some carried for use, some even for barbaric luxury. And when they had crossed over, they had nothing to look upon but the enemy and those strange apparitions. Bronze and iron warded them off from afar from approaching. And so great was the arrogance of the equipment and the doings that it seemed enough for the barbarians merely to be seen. For they thought that, as in games, all would at once give up and yield themselves without a struggle. This was the first public trial set in the midst before mankind, of virtue against wealth and of the Greek spirit against the multitude and equipment of barbarians, judged not by the praise of words, but by the demonstration of deeds and by the call of the occasion. For they did not turn the sight to fear, but used it for eagerness; nor were they astonished at the strangeness of what they saw, but rejoiced to see how much they would prove the better of, and reckoning that they had received, as it were, a starting-point from fortune to outdo all mankind in valour, and that this was more than to have so great an army — like using money in abundance — and considering that now, as it were, they would be splendidly feasted by the barbarians, worthily of their own virtue. For horses and arrows and ships and bracelets and torques and hounds and all goods are gifts of fortune set before the better men, and victory delivers all these. These things both the generals said to themselves and each of the men discoursed to one another; and beginning from the gods and from the dear paean,
they advanced at a run, as though running across an empty plain, and gave the barbarians no chance to see what was happening; but in one moment the ranks were broken and men were being slain and horses taken and ships dragged off and goods carried away, and what was being done was a dance of Pan. Already a man, even when he had died, stood upright, shot through by the barbarians, frightening the rest as though he were immortal. And those who had dared great things and bore off the trophies, even as they perished, appeared more in number on the ships than before. For neither the marsh nor the sea received them adequately, nor was there room for the wretches, nor any way of escape; but then they truly perceived themselves to be a mob, and their own greatest hindrance, and they were worsted by their very numbers — more than anyone would at first have ventured to withstand. So that the rivers of blood sufficed to keep the ships afloat in deep water. So great was the brilliance of those men, and so great the worth of the victory, that they made even the place a kind of symbol of virtue. There is no one, then, who, hearing the name of Marathon, is not roused in his soul, nor who does not greet and revere its name, unlike any other, with joy. And it befell the city to be the first of the mainland Greeks to face danger, and alone to suffice for victory, and to make the prizes of her own private dangers common to all, and, being the nurse of Greece, to do the opposite of what is customary. For the law says that others should receive the wages of nurture from those they have reared; but the city, besides the nurture and what she gave from the beginning, gave back freedom together with safety to Greece in her own dangers, as though owing this to the Greeks, to do them good through all, and having agreed to this beforehand toward all. So that one may reasonably say that it is fitting for the city to honour Zeus the Deliverer for what was done, and for the
other Greeks to honour the city, and to consider the people of the Athenians as, in a manner, the deliverer for the Greeks. And it seems to me that the battle was allotted by fortune to the city, and belonged by race to none other than the Athenians. For that battle, if it may be said somewhat boldly, became as it were the mother-city and starting-point of all that came after for the Greeks — initiated beforehand not only as a foundation or pattern of the contests in their wars, but of all pursuits and of life and of choice and, to say all in a word, of the seed of the Greeks. And had the city not then so excelled, all would have been swept away — bodies and deeds and discourse and the common things of human nature. Now the many marvel at how many myriads of barbarians they conquered; but to me it seems that those men conquered all mankind, not only those against whom they contended — if I may say so, begging off envy — not only by becoming the cause of such goods for all, but also by leaving none near to what they possessed. So that, if to fail of equality belongs to the inferior, they have conquered all. I think, then, that even if I had selected these things alone and stopped, the discourse would have a sufficient end, and the city would need no further ambition or virtue toward her kindred. For the city that first sent up men, first found the use of life, nourished not only those from herself but all, received those who were cast out first and most, both severally and all together, and again sent out most everywhere, and again in the contests for safety presided over both — those abroad and those of the old Greece — how could one not say she has come through to the very end, and like the runners has filled out what comes to pass? So that none can be proclaimed before her among the Greeks. For before others began the like, the city had already gone so far.
Yet her deeds do not allow her to depart, but call her and bring her forward into what comes next of the discourse — and the more, the more exactly these things have been examined. For the city made so great a surpassing in what followed that she outwent herself by as much as she had before outwent the others. And before one could worthily admire the first things, she added the second, as though contending against herself. For when the daring at Marathon had taken place and the barbarians had been driven out of Greece like dust, Darius did not know what to do, but as though smitten by a god he had fallen prostrate before the city, and blamed those responsible for the crossing as having ill brought the Athenians upon him; and he dies indeed, before working any second evil for himself. But the man who surpassed all kings in his designs and left nothing to be reckoned strange — Xerxes son of Darius — condemning his father as having attempted too feebly, and despising the city and the Greeks as bound to be nowhere, contends a double contest: to surpass the one and to take vengeance on the other, with much superiority. And he so insulted them by his excess that he resolved to make the former expedition appear, as it were, child's play. And it seems to me that Xerxes then wished to vie not only with his father, but with every sight and report ever beyond men's hope, to show, as it were, that the earth was firmly his. For what onset of waves, what thunderbolts, what earthquakes, what assault of clouds or hail, what unwonted stars did he not make appear lighter than himself? Or what terrors of land or sea did he not gather to himself? Whose threats it was not possible to hear standing still, but they carried men off to the ends of the earth, and foretold things which could be found nowhere except in him alone. For he said
that he asked for nothing belonging to others, but only first-fruits of earth and water; yet that he was lord of all these. And of the offence at Marathon there was, he said, one release and remission: if they would yield these things and come among the rest of mankind and acknowledge the common master; but if not, he would teach them well, together with their ancestral gods. For so it seemed good both to the gods and to Xerxes, on behalf of Xerxes' affairs. For he would come bringing all: ships, as many as the Greek sea would not hold; with horse and foot he would hide Attica from sight, and would set the city resounding with hooves, and would burn the temples and break open the tombs and rebuild everything. And further he threatened dishonoured allotments in the Atlantic sea and a making of land outside the inhabited world, which he would compel them, maimed, to heap up into the deep, drawing water and digging rocks, with only so much of their bodies left as would suffice for the work. And he did not threaten things so strange and beyond the borders and greater than fear, and then come to an end there; but he hid his threats by his deeds — without, however, being able to do anything, I mean against the city. For what midland region, what Atlantic shore did he not shake? Or what gulf of those that men know — I mean of those that run in from the outer sea — did he leave untaxed of contribution? Not the gulf to Phasis, not the upper Persian, not the Red Sea, not Hyrcania — did he not gather them all? Did he not search all the recesses of the earth more exactly than Datis searched Eretria? Did he not bound his expedition by the ends of earth and sea, as though dragging a net round his own empire? What apparition was not then set in motion? Or what of things that were was not overlooked? Or what of things that were not did not come to be? Did not the straits seem to him to differ so far from rivers that they would not even give him a drink? And the ever-flowing rivers were no
otherwise disposed than the winter-torrents — or rather, they came round to the opposite of the torrents; for as the streams of the latter are increased by Zeus, so under Xerxes all failed. Neither land nor sea received him adequately, and these too spoke to suit his need and changed into one another. For land in part came to be, in part was lost; and the sea withdrew and again came together for the king — and even now there is as much new sea as the time of his crossing, and Athos is left in place of a monument to the deed — and, to say all, everything seemed to be in motion and changing place as it might seem good to him. And camels gleamed with gold and silver, occupying as much ground as it is longest to traverse. And if he desired shade, a golden tree was his shade. So that by night he flashed with silver and gold, and by day he brought on night wherever he bade men shoot. To many of those he led, the place of the world they were now in was invisible. There was no nation along his march too great to be hidden. And, ambitious to learn — that all-strange king — how many he led (for this too had to be possible for him), he was forced to measure rather than to number his army in a way, and, constructing a wall to hold ten thousand men, he counted by measure. And so he went, moving everything, taking on as many as he met, and he cowed both nations and cities and all races, both European and all those in Asia, and they yielded to his movement like light things, with much fear. But the city displayed other things in answer; and one could not admire Xerxes for his arrogance more than the city for admiring nothing of his — she who, when so great a tumult had broken over all the earth and both continents were being decided upon in Greece, held out like a wall and bulwark, beginning from the beginning to display her own
things herself. First, in the skirmishes and trials about the letters she so far excelled in spirit, and was so far from being scared by the inducements of those strange terrors, that she no longer needed a decree about them, but, as though one common decree, that of Darius' time, had won — to hear no barbarian before granting an assembly — she does away with the messengers, equipment and embroidery and all, and became the leader of the answer for those of the Greeks who were of sound mind. Then, when all were announcing those terrible things — that all goods were being mingled, and the last of the Greeks would gain advantage, and all would be covered as by a wave of war — and when so great consternation held men at the barbarian, so that they likened it to the march of some god driving against Greece with the rest of mankind, she yielded none the more, nor repented of what she had resolved, nor blamed herself for her answer, but called the Greeks together to the common contest — ashamed, it seems to me, to appear alone before the barbarian, as before at Marathon. For she herself had not her hopes of safety in others, but all had their hopes for themselves in her, since they alike needed safety and freedom; and the example for both was at hand, the former judgment near; and she considered by what counsel she might first amaze the barbarian in return — and she outdid him in marvels. For she removes her dwelling and rises up; and, greatest of all, nowhere to land — for all the land was held — but withdrew to the sea; and, against his digging through about Athos and the bridging of the strait, she displayed in answer this daring, no less unpleasant to hear nor poorer in judgment, by appearing upon the sea, and left to Xerxes only the trace to look upon. So that when he came he did not find the city, nor could he take it though he held it, as he supposed. Thus
he was driven into a baffling and prodigious riddle. But just as some of the poets say that Alexander took the phantom of Helen but could not take her herself, so Xerxes too held the ground of the city, but did not find her — except, indeed, that he found her well at Artemisium and Salamis, and could not bear the sight, as of some Gorgon in a tale, but, struck with terror, feared not only for the rest but for his very body, having all the time before been unused to this and having lived together with the causing of fear. And what I foretold even before touching on these matters — that both races were brilliantly worsted by the city, the Greek and the barbarian, the one failing of all, the other not even coming near — and again what I said a little before, that she gathered the Greeks more out of shame than out of need: now it is fitting to say this, and possible to learn it through the facts. For to one who examines it on every side she will appear so far to surpass that she would justly be called not the first of the Greek cities, nor most of all the cause of freedom, but rather the sole worker of the whole. For first, all would agree to this: that to those so far inferior in ships and arms and bodies and money and in all the equipment of war, one thing alone was left as a counterweight, and that truly Greek — to deliberate well; or else they must be ignobly trampled down, like things that rise but a little above the ground. For so far were they from sufficing to be a counterpart to their adversaries, that, had they become an addition to the king, they would not even have been noticed. This being so, and all being of one mind in this — both wise men and many — there is no gainsaying that it is she who furnished the one who deliberated, both for them and for the others, what was to save them.
And what hangs upon this, and yet by itself affords a sufficient demonstration, let us consider again. For no one is so dull, nor so opposed in mind to the plain facts, as not to agree that the affairs of the Greeks then came down to the ships, and that this was the best of counsels. For those who went out to Thermopylae and ranged themselves at the passes — some did not endure even the approach, as of an oncoming cloud, but shamefully ruined the design, forced to flee and save themselves each apart while the terrors were yet to come; so unlike did they imitate the battle of Marathon. And those who were left behind could not accomplish the same as at Marathon, but stayed at once as men about to suffer rather than to do, and, buried, perished, adorning Greece by this one thing alone — by dying nobly — and displaying only so much. But the barbarians went on like a torrent through all who now received them. And yet this is a sign of two things: that none of the Greeks appeared on land like the city and like what those men formerly accomplished — or rather, that not even all together were like her — and that the affairs of the Greeks were then left to the sea alone. This being so clear, and leaving no one in doubt that the counsel had become twofold, the city so far surpassed in these matters that one might even be ashamed on behalf of the rest of Greece. First, by the multitude of her triremes she so brilliantly excelled that, if one were to take apart the city's own dignity and power and look only at the number of the fleet that was gathered, one might reckon the city's ships to be the ships of all, and those common to all to be the ships of some one of the cities among the Greeks. So that if one of the gods had asked the Greeks then, supposing it were necessary that all should not fight, nor possible, whether they would rather have present the ships of all the others, or those from Athens alone, all would have said there was no
choice but that the Athenians should contend on their behalf. And if again the god himself had questioned them — "Do you then agree that you trust the Athenians on your own behalf more than yourselves?" — there could surely be no denying it. For they did not bring in a part to the common stock, but the whole contribution from all became a part of the city's own. And indeed they contributed such good courage and daring that to surpass so far in ships was a small thing. For alone of all mankind they endured to abandon their own city, that they might not look on while that of all the rest was made desolate; and alone, suffering this not at the hands of enemies, they removed themselves out by their own act for the sake of victory — not in misfortune at the hands of others, but they turned to virtue the very things that to others seem the limit of misfortunes in war, and took from Xerxes his hopes so far as concerned themselves, showing that even if ten thousand times he should hold the land, and search out the hearths, and tear up everything from the foundations, he would none the more cast down the dignity of the Athenians, nor take from them the being Athenians, but would labour at endless things, like the condemned in Hades. And yet what eagerness more brilliant, what good courage more manifest, will appear to one who examines what Greeks — or, to put it absolutely, what men? They gave up the land that they might be slaves neither on land nor on sea, reckoning that to keep what they had was the beginning of slavery, and making the loss of what they had a starting-point of goods to come; and they saved those who had their own from the very things by which they had given up their own. Such, then, was their eagerness before the dangers and toward the dangers — so unreasoning, so to speak, or, to say what is truer, so reasonable. And their conduct during the very contest and danger was so conspicuous that to them alone it may be said they conquered by themselves; for they were the first to make the rout.
But I wish to go back a little and to say something further before the sea-battle. For all others praise the multitude of the ships and the eagerness of the city and her deeds; but I — even if it is strange to say it — assert that they have all left out one thing, no less worthy than these to see and to admire, which I will now myself set in the midst, not ashamed of the truth. For whoever passes this over out of shame, and does so out of goodwill toward the city, acts much as if he should pass over the sea-battle out of goodwill toward the city. For the men of that day won both victories most clearly of all mankind, both having long dwelt in Athens and having recovered her still more nobly: for their enemies they conquered with arms, and their friends with their fairness. For consider: men who furnished so great eagerness for the safety of all, who paid in so great a contribution to the common need, who were everything — the affairs depending on the sea and the ships, those in the ships on the city, and the rest, as in a stormy season, taking refuge in their power and riding at anchor upon their virtue and fortune — and who, as I said, could not themselves have denied that this was so: that such men should add so much gentleness and greatness of spirit as to concede the leadership in name to others, and not to contend, nor, for the sake of things which even the dullest in nature would have claimed, and which others on their behalf, having no voice at all, would not so much as utter or hesitate over — how does this not show that all wisdom was truly with those men, and that they were the best of all men, whether one examine them by nations or by individuals or in any way whatever? For if they then, vexed at such folly, had stood aside or turned to contention, what device of safety, what good dream would have been left to the rest, or
what use of more or fewer ships would still have been there for the Greeks in their need? For come, by the gods — that we may dwell a little upon the discourse and that one may see more clearly their character and all that I am saying — suppose they had then asked the leadership of the Greeks, saying that, if they were defeated in the sea-battle, they would not be free to choose their own leaders, nor would the barbarian let them have any say over those who should rule among them, but they would have to follow him shamefully and become slaves and prey — and perhaps not even to follow, but, made to vanish in whatever manner seemed good to him, to depart from among men, with their temples and arms and laws; and saying that "we, foreseeing this, have changed our whole city into triremes, and, whether one must dare the greatest things, the common things of human nature have been given up by us on your behalf, or whether one must so equip oneself, since it is unlivable to be defeated, we have resolved on this; and to us alone victory is necessary; so that, whether you need anything of victory, so much has been already accomplished for you by us, or whether the contribution too must be considered, we alone fill two parts of the whole, and these but a twentieth of what comes from us" — if they had said this and added these heads, that "if you accept on these terms, well; but if not, consider whether you will not be depriving us of greater things than yourselves"; and if indeed they had added — for I leave aside the leader, who so far surpassed all that he was one in place of all, who alone, like a seer, expounded places and seasons and the secrets of the barbarians and what was to come — but if they had added to the challenge this only, that "if you have determined otherwise, another will gladly give us your leadership and add Median money and gifts; in view of which, choose whichever you wish" — would they have spoken either things not in keeping with justice, or such as the present necessities allowed one to overlook, if
they had used these arguments? For surely not — when the sea alone was left, and they were furnishing so many ships of their own, and were the head of the hopes, and stood at the turning-point of safety, and were the only fighters worthy of the affair, and had put themselves forward before all, in the rank not only of leaders but of fathers, and held, so to speak, the leadership from the very things they were doing — but suppose, on the contrary, that all things were common, and that no one excelled anyone, and that all contributed equally, and that the admirals were alike in their natures to one another, and it was a common fund, and one had to consider from what was available and appoint those who should lead: how could those men not shine through all like stars? Or how could they not, by the votes, be above all together, and not only by their skill? And yet this seems the least of just claims in such matters. For surely it was not the case that, on each single trireme, the steersmen ruled them, chosen for their craft, but that the leadership of them all was owed not to those most skilled in these things — but this too was a small part of the justice on their side. But this at least is plain, and alone sufficient: that, when some of those gathered had to lead the war against the barbarian, ought not those who alone, in the face of the former expedition of these same barbarians, faced danger on behalf of all — ought not these to lead? For those to whom the present was common with the rest who shared it, these conquered all by their own private deeds; and they would have received so much the smaller favour, by as much as they had freed all and were going to lead in the present matters.
And indeed, if no one gainsaid them in this, but all with both hands withdrew, how is it not worthy to admire their greatness of spirit? — who in every way overlooked their own concerns, and, having raised themselves so high before, yet again at that time, being ambitious beyond nature, sought nothing more. But if the Greeks were not going to heed them, and in anger abandoned them, what was there, in the midst of a Greece not even taken from her among the barbarians, to keep her from being admired — yet not even to have a name left now? But indeed
one of three things was necessary: either, all yielding, to hold the leadership — than which one could name no greater proof of their virtue and of their freeing the Greeks for nothing; or, none conceding this, all to perish, left in the lurch; or, for the votes to come out divided, in which case there was civil strife and war against one another, with no resource against the barbarians — a thing which, while it came about by the nature of the matter, is seen to have been prevented by their forethought. And indeed, if these things which I have just gone through were moving them, and they then kept their reckonings in silence, they offered a test of the utmost endurance. But if they thought themselves in no way the losers, whom is it worthy to set in the same rank with them, who knew how to be angry at the barbarians alone? But I think they arranged everything for this one end: to rescue both those present and those absent, the one willing, the other unwilling, and they saw this alone to be just; since, if they had examined everything purely, no Greek would then have been at Salamis. For I will add Salamis for the sake of good omen. But as it was, they judged this enough for themselves — that the affairs of the Greeks should be set right. And on this account they gave up not only the leadership, but the city itself, preferring the common interest to all private security and advantage, and reckoning that they would truly accomplish a great leadership, if they should lead the Greeks toward freedom and safety. And the Lacedaemonians, like men teaching children beforehand, they wished to make more eager. And on this account they led them out in front, for the sake of exhortation and that they might imitate what was being done by themselves. And these things they did even in their decrees. Yet they did not, as in word and in the wing of the line of battle, so also in deeds yield the leadership to others — far from it; but the one party furnished the name of leaders, the other the deeds, and the figure was set so much the nobler for them, in proportion as they held leadership over the leaders
themselves. For whatever did not seem good to a single one of the Athenians was all void; so that the Lacedaemonian admiral ruled the commanders from each people, but the Athenian ruled a ruler of commanders. And the Greeks, seeing this for themselves, gave the prize of the sea-battles to the city, and furnished the testimony of those truly present and eyewitnesses as to who had led them toward safety. And it befell the city to bear off the first honours from two sides at once. For among cities Athens excelled, and among men one man, an Athenian. Thus what was a matter of gentleness of character they showed in conceding; and what belonged to a true leadership was assigned to those men by all. And indeed, for the rest of the war, the Greeks now set the city purely at their head; for all the gatherings and councils, from this time on, were toward the Athenians and from the Athenians, and the city became the common council-chamber of the war against the barbarian.
But the zeal about the demonstrations, and one argument handing us on to another, has carried us too far. I return again to the very deeds, since I have set out in the midst the things I wished. And let no one think that we are spending more time than is needed, or taking up again things already worked out; but let him consider how great is the need, and the occasion of each part of the discourse, and where it tends. And if he considers thus, the things said will seem many, but each to be said once for all; and that by necessity they are all rivals, so that one cannot leave anything out without slighting it, but that by their arrangement they cannot fall otherwise; and what for the moment seems a digression he will know to belong to the continuity and the sequence, taking these things up in his own mind and considering whether they might somehow fit better otherwise. And further: if we were making this examination and zeal about matters of no worth, or about those whose examples are taken from next door, one might reasonably
- say we were splitting hairs; but as it is, concerning matters about which all the poets, in speaking, have fallen short, and all the power of words has been worsted, and all men, as if from amazement, marvel rather than those who have seen each thing in exactness — concerning these we contend a contest in words little less than those men contended in deeds at that time. It is fitting, then, to leave nothing idle or unexamined, since alike the zeal over small things brings blame and the failing, in matters so great, to preserve the worth throughout. For this too one might say is, in another fashion, the act of a hairsplitter. But I return.
For when the disaster at Thermopylae had befallen, and Greece had been opened up brilliantly and perilously, some poured in like men breaking through the gates of a wall, robbed of neither of two divisions. For some willingly, some by necessity, went over, as the war flooded round and all in succession fled before it like an oncoming fire; but those who in many cases and often had already shown that they are rightly named after Athena, and use the goddess's mind very graciously, and were conscious that the city's guard lay outside, make a decree: to entrust the city to the city-holding goddess, to place their children and wives in safekeeping at Troezen, and themselves, stripped of superfluities, to put forward the sea — furnishing, on a single day, all the things one might call greatest among men as tokens of piety, endurance, prudence, humanity, greatness of spirit: of piety, through the trust they had in the gods; of endurance, severed from their children and wives and the company of their nearest, with hearts that bore it; of humanity, because they endured these things for the safety of others. And indeed, for greatness of spirit, who of men is like to those who gave up their possessions for freedom? But indeed to know the one thing that was going to preserve all their affairs —
wisdom, I mean — through which they surpassed all who ever were even in that obedience to rulers which is honoured by all in words, by their resolution. And they, thus stripped for action, held the Greeks at Salamis; while he was at hand with both hands, leading the Greeks up to Attica together with the barbarians, and sends again to Salamis, ordering what he had before, to take earth and water, thinking that, if the talk came while the terrors were present and seen, they would somewhat the more be bent and would lend an ear; and there he was most of all cheated of his hope. For so far were they from fear, or from changing their minds about what had been resolved from the beginning, that when someone dared to say they ought to yield, the men themselves, and the women falling upon the woman, destroyed them out of hand. And this was the first exhortation toward the sea-battle that came to the Greeks, common to the men and the women. Nor did they shame it by their deeds in what followed; but first, when the Greeks were deliberating things unworthy of the daring at Artemisium and of the Athenian presence, and flight was already winning, they themselves prevented it and forced them, like unwilling children, to stand firm, working everything by their attendance — at first persuading them, who scarcely admitted a word; then, since it was endless, unexpectedly laying necessity upon them and contriving the sea-battle, so that they took courage perforce. Then, when the meeting was made and the barbarians had covered with their ships all the space outside, then, being shut out of land and sea by just so much as the triremes occupied, and truly, as on the sea and amid waves, seeing the same thing on every side wherever they looked — enemies — they yielded to others in nothing, but were themselves the first to begin the sea-battle, as in Euboea
so too here, when all the others hung back, they alone wrought the whole. Whatever, by a general's forethought, had to be done beforehand to harm the king — so as to find friends and fellow-suppliants for victory among the enemy (I mean the affair concerning the Ionians) — that they prepared; and what had to be done by the law of hands and with common good courage, this they both dared and accomplished most nobly of all under the sun as witness, ranging themselves opposite to those who were the head of the enemy's fleet, and being the first to rout and to destroy the ships in every kind of action, here and there, and leaving the rest to pursue rather than to fight a sea-battle. So that to me the Greeks seem to have won that sea-battle much as if, present at Marathon too, they had shared in the victory. For there the city sufficed for herself, and at Salamis the rest enjoyed what was done. And then the Lacedaemonians came a single day too late for the battle; on that day the contributors came too late even for the rout. And so great is the difference, that one might reasonably say the Greeks justly owe the city thanks not only for their freedom and for the prizes of the sea-battle, but for the victory itself. For they appear to have taken this too as some additional gain, and to have shared in the ambition in common. There then every beach was full of wrecks, all the straits were confounded, and the passage carried out to the mainland for the king dreadful sights, very much out of tune with his cleverness and luxury. And it is fitting to make mention also of the addition to the evils that befell the barbarians. For the by-work of the deeds was wrought out as no less honourable. What, then, was this? Three places the barbarians had seized at the outset — the mainland, the sea, the island before
Salamis — so that the Greeks might be shut in more exactly than by a net. For it seems a great calamity, even contrary to the Median law, if any of those who dared to lift their hand against the king should escape. Against those, then, who were cast out of the sea-battle, the chief part of the army was stationed — the foremost men of the Persians — and they held the island, standing by as though over a sure prey. But when they failed of the first prizes, and fortune was with the Greeks and the trial had turned about, one Athenian man undertook the danger willingly, and taking those of them who were on Salamis, the older men, and landing them on the island, kills all this Persian force. And Xerxes sat upon the mainland in his array, as though making some other contest, or as one of the judges from heaven of what was happening, thinking that the fear of him would suffice for his own men. And the deed was for him only so great as to be angry at some of his soldiers and to honour others. But when he saw the sea boiling with blood and surge, and everything full of corpses and wrecks, and others more masterful frightening both his men and himself, struck with terror and thinking the city a wonder-worker, he sang a recantation, and turning back, went the same road — not with the same array, now making this one thing his contest, to reach the bridge.
Thus through all the city saved the whole Greek race, and was shown to all to be the only safeguard for the Greeks — and, I think, for the rest of the inhabited world as well. By what marks do I say "to all"? By those in which she conquered before alone at Marathon; by those in which afterward she so far outwent her fellow-combatants; by those in which she herself was the head of the war in both expeditions; by those who failed at Thermopylae without the city, and those who won at Artemisium through the city; by the oracles of the god, some of which said the gift was Athena's, others that the Greeks would perish if the Athenians sided
with the barbarians. So that from what the Greeks did not suffer and from what they were going to suffer, from what the city did and what she alone did not do, she carries off the judgment of the whole; and besides this, by the contribution of her general, by the multitude of her triremes, by beginning the sea-battles, by finding the places, by holding the Greeks together, by being the first to conquer the greatest part of the fleet, by destroying the most, by the apparitions from Eleusis, by the extra deeds at Psyttaleia, by the witness of her foes. For the one party gave the prize of valour to the city, and gave that she should lead in matters where she already led; and their king fled away. So that from gods and from men, from friends and from foes, the votes were given to the city. And to her, again, these things come from two sides: some from what was approved and accomplished in common, some from what was done through the general. And the king's affairs stood thus; but Mardonius was left behind, longing for death, conscious that he had been in part responsible for the expedition, and resolving on something even from this same staying and fortune — having dared, and having received from the king the best of the foot, he sat down before them. Yet not even for these things did the Greeks need others, but, as though it were one further thing left, the city wrought this out too, and went through to the very end, like men plaiting garlands. The others, then, take pride in their share of the battle, all who indeed were present — and these not coming near the city in size of camp or in eagerness; but your city won again, long before the battle, both Mardonius and the king, in a victory truly her own and belonging to the Athenians alone. For when all the Greek race looked to her, and it had been well recognized by both sides where the masters of affairs lay — both by the Greeks, I mean, and by the barbarians — a thought comes to the king and to Mardonius, which one may call both shrewd and silly
at once. The strongest course of all was plainly this, if it had succeeded; but this was, more than anything, impossible. And what was this? They planned to bring the city over to themselves and to strip her of her Greek character — not only conscious of the past, but seeing the present too, that it was through her that things were led; and besides, the oracles from Delphi, as it is said, expressly bore witness that, if the Athenians should join with them, the affairs of the Greeks would be gone. It seemed good, then, to the king — both buying off his fear and bethinking him of the gain — to make trial of the city; and he sends heralds saying the opposite of before. For in place of the earth and water he had asked before, these things he now offered — and not on an equal measure, but on the one hand he gave them back their city and all their land, on the other he added the rest of Greece as a gift. And apart from these, there was money beyond all that was among the Greeks, and to be his friends and allies securely; from which he testified that he both feared them alone and trusted them alone, more than all he had, if he could persuade them. And the sum of the embassy was such. And the herald was Alexander, king of Macedonia. But they were so far from admiring the promises, or from thinking that even if he gave all he possessed he was worthy of them, that the office of public-guest saved the ambassador. Nor even so did they send him off altogether without fear, but warned him that, unless he were beyond their borders before sunset, and that for the future he should be public-guest of some others rather than the Athenians, since such embassies could not be brought without death; and at the same time guides led him through the land, so that none should touch him or speak with him. This answer I hold no less worthy of admiration than the sea-battle at Salamis and the trophies, and to afford no less ambition either to those who gave it or to him
who persuaded them. For in those things they had to make use also of arms and triremes and engines, but here they used their own pure selves, judgment and word.
What contestants of virtue, then, are nobler, or who of all that ever were made a more lasting display of it? — who continued unconquered by gold and silver and iron and all things, and made everything alike useless to the king, as though it were still hidden beneath the earth, honouring poverty above wealth, choosing dangers above security, and justice above so great a humanity from the king. And it was not that they were thus hostile and arrayed against the barbarian promises, but submissive to the Greek ones, if there were added the show of need, or, so far at least as to give them a longer hearing. But when the Lacedaemonians came in great fear and begged the opposite of the king's embassy, promising to feed their children and old men and women for them so long as the war lasted, they pardoned rather than accepted it — counting them good through fear, but in their offers still inexperienced of the Athenians; and they showed their greatness of spirit no less by restraining their anger than by thrusting away the offers. For, being made by nature to do good and not to receive it, they knew that they themselves owed a wage to those who do good to the Greek race, and not that they should receive from others a wage for their virtue, nor love for gain those who gave themselves up — no more than one loves children and parents for gain — but should save them even at expense, as is fitting for those whose minds are disposed as toward their own. And this so great deed shone forth for the account of virtue in the seasons of the war, between the sea-battle at Salamis and the battle at Plataea. And again from these things, apart from what I went through before, both the king and the Greeks, in everything, set the Athenians foremost — the one calling them to his side through Mardonius, the others begging them not to do these things through
the Lacedaemonians. For the dragging on both sides and the calling of each party to themselves was a plain vote and clear pledge from both, that they were conscious that the Athenians were stronger, by no little, than themselves and than their adversaries. And having hoped thus from the beginning, they departed admiring still more; for the one party they did not endure, the other they received with much superiority. So that the likely thing too was added: that they themselves should cast their own worthy vote on their own behalf, and that there should be three witnesses in succession — the enemies, the allies, and themselves, having shown themselves alike in deed throughout. And gathering the Greeks, who could now better follow them, they come to Plataea. And the dignity of the camps, or the array of the barbarians, as it was ranged through Boeotia, or the things before the battle, to relate is a waste not reaching to the matter's worth. But again a wonderful testimony is given to the city by both sides at the battle. For the Lacedaemonians yielded to the Athenians the post against the Persians, as though it were allotted by some necessity and by nature that the Persians should be conquered by the Athenians. And again Mardonius led the Lacedaemonians round against himself, choosing them in exchange, thinking it more to his profit that the Lacedaemonians should die nobly than that the Athenians should conquer nobly; for he found this from the examples concerning themselves. So, as boxers first contend for their stance, they on the one hand received the Persians, on the other received all men, and were, in all, victorious — the barbarians by valour, the Greeks by valour and by numbers. And they decide the battle, going through all, and destroying the leaders of the horse. And when there was need of an assault on the wall, the others were toward them only so far as one would be ashamed to say, until of the barbarians some no longer held Boeotia as before, lying low,
while others, as though from a shipwreck, unarmed and out of order, holding the night more precious than the day, withdrew, few from many, and the many in small bands, with much memory of the proud army and of the Athenians. When matters had come to this, all the other Greeks gladly drew breath, having escaped a storm beyond what they had even expected, and crowned the city, and admired her, and held whatever they might say of her too small. So far were they from being able to do anything that should seem worthy of her; and she here, most of all, displayed the abundance of her virtue. For she went so far in the matter as to show the barbarians still more, outside Greece, who they were that had done these things to them within Greece, and from whom, having judged it a good thing to flee, they departed.
I see, then, that the discourse is being stretched out, and that after such things as have been said it is not easy either to speak with any pleasure, or to find hearers — like another contestant entering after one already well-approved. Yet I undertook these speeches not for the sake of charm so much as to show, with truth, the worth of the city; so that I shall do wrong by leaving off rather than weary by speaking. Then one must reflect, even from the very symbol of the speeches, that we are not bound to measure even the feast of the Panathenaia itself by a single day, but — if this too must be added — the multitude of days has been set aside for ornament and solemnity; so that neither is the multitude of words out of season in such a season of deeds. We know, surely, that the gymnastic contest, and still more the musical one, is not bounded once for all, but ends, so to speak, on each day and again begins from the beginning, and is not filled out by the kinds of spectacle on a single day. So that whatever escapes the present occasion has not, at any rate, passed by the whole festival. Or it would be altogether absurd,
- if the lawgivers extended their gatherings for this very reason — and, by Zeus, even overstepped the very name of the sacred month, adding more time, that we might be in one another's company as long as possible — and we, instead of using this, should find fault. As, then, we are not vexed at meeting the exercises of the games day by day, but enjoy as a gain the spectacle ever present, so it is fitting to feel about the speeches too — and these too among the things allotted to the festival; assuredly you will not meet with things always stale among what is left over, nor commune with things less honourable than those.
But, that I may not, in begging off beyond what is necessary, lengthen by this very thing, I will turn now to the next and continuous part of the speeches. For when Greece had become her own again and all had departed — ships, horses, the foot, satraps, king — first there were festivals and processions to the gods such as no one remembers to have taken place either before or after in a free Greece. For it was not a law that gathered them, nor a fixed cycle of time, but out of the events themselves it was given to each man and to cities to be of good cheer and to wear garlands and to call the gods to witness the happiness at hand. And on the one hand an altar of Zeus the Deliverer was set up — a thank-offering to the god himself and a memorial to those who had succeeded, on the very spot of the deeds, carrying a common exhortation to the Greeks both to concord and to despise the barbarians; on the other, the common shrine of the Greeks at Delphi was adorned with fair and fitting inscriptions, and the cities took on not only the ornament that comes from virtue, but also that from building, and the wealth of the barbarians was distributed among the better men. And indeed here too the city will appear to have excelled by as much as in the very deeds. For first
she adorned the acropolis with memorials of the deeds, and added to the beauty of nature a rival ornament from wealth and art, so that the whole was, in place of a dedication — or rather in place of a statue. And next she hung up other honours for the gods, beyond all Greek power, some at home, some abroad; and she herself passed her ancient bounds in every direction, worthily of the deeds, and made an addition to her circuit. To put it briefly, she alone was made uninhabited through virtue, and she alone, out of virtue, was inhabited again and took on what was before uninhabited, becoming, in deeds and glory and ornament, fairer and greater. But here I have fallen, as it were unwillingly, along the road of the discourse rather than by foresight; for it was not toward these things that I was hastening, but I wished to show this: that if the fairest thing for men, and at the same time the most profitable and that which conquers in pleasure, is the visits and converse of the gods, and this then blossomed to so great a height among the Greeks, one would most justly assign it to this one city — first by reason of the honour of the gods truly itself; for we all repay the gods as the causes of our goods, and the city appears to have been, of what then came to men, in the highest degree the cause of what resulted; and next by so far excelling in the very dedications and thank-offerings. For these symbols of her piety are proofs of beauty and greatness. Yet she did not think this enough — to give thanks to the gods for what had happened and to seek nothing further, nor to sit upon her trophies, as though distrusting herself; but, judging her present possessions a stepping-stone to what was to come, she contended against herself, deliberating nobly and as befitted the occasion: for in the second times she thought fit to do the second things. And these were
to march out in turn against those who had first made war upon her, and to remove the fears and the dangers into their country. And this is most worthy of admiration among those deeds — the figure of the war and its constitution. For of two other kinds of war — the one, if one begins from the beginning; the other, if one defends oneself — the former is not attended by justice, while from the latter the addition of necessity takes away the ambition, since by nature deliberate choice is separated from necessity. Now, I think, the one who does what is just under necessity is better than the one who transgresses willingly; yet not the whole, so to speak, becomes his own. And so then the disgrace of the former war fell upon the barbarians, and what was owed met them from the Greeks; so that they had conquered, but the part that comes of abundance was not present. But what one might call a third figure of war — to march out in turn against those who first plotted, using the freedom of those who begin and the justice of those who defend — this, then, the city resolved to show the barbarians, both on her own behalf and on behalf of the other Greeks: that it does not rest with them, when they come, to make the Greeks brave, nor that these things were done by them through chance and necessity, but because they thought it not honourable for the others to rule first; "and now, when rule has come round to the rank of the just, you will know well and nobly whom you have stirred up." Thus I say that, for a demonstration of justice and of true courage, the second deeds — that I may say nothing offensive — were wrought by the city no less clearly than the former. And besides this, she reckoned that the safety and preservation of the Greeks lay not in keeping them shut up at their hearth, nor in doing nothing either through them or themselves on their own behalf, but in thrusting the barbarians as far as possible from Greece; so she thought there would be the best and purest peace for all — reckoning rightly and seeing things as they are by nature. For nearly those alone are purely at peace who have shown that they are not at all in need of keeping peace.
Such was the reasoning of the city, containing all that one might call fairest in human nature. Having so resolved — and what should I say first, or what last? — they won the battle at Mycale by no small margin, and searched the coasts of Europe, in case any of the invaders were still hidden, and drove some from the Strymon, some from Sestos, some from Byzantium. They went over all, purging it as it were of pollution, and they cast anchor no less than men sailing on trade. And the journey of Triptolemus, told to have been through the air, in the part where he had left off, they imitated. For he, doing good to all in common; they, going against those from whom vengeance had to be taken, punishing — thinking that this too profited the common race of mankind, to bring the insolent and those who think beyond their nature to fitting penalties. Having so resolved, at once they sailed round Asia, and at once they sailed up by the receiving rivers, and at once they were heard, at once they were seen; and they displayed a wonderful and truly armed war-dance. So densely and intensely did they rush upon the matters that even the Lacedaemonians, present at the first of the deeds, then departed, as men unable to follow the winged. And this same thing those of the other Greeks too who had first sailed out with them did — they grew dizzy and departed; while those who held the men from Asia, whom the king had before led against them and Greece, these they used as sufficient. And the king's own affairs were a starting-point for them against the king. For roadsteads and walls and stockades and everything received them, and arms and ships became theirs. And they left no part of their own virtue untried, fighting at sea, at once against Phoenicians and Cilicians and Cyprians in the midst of the Egyptian sea and capturing whole fleets, and at the same moment against the whole Persian
empire risking themselves on land, destroying and capturing numbers of nations in place of a number of bodies. And already two trophies came in one day, and a sea-battle was matched with a land-battle. And they so surpassed the king that they made his empire and its places more renowned by their victories. The Eurymedon, at any rate, is sung not least because of these men. And they showed that one need not cross by yoking the straits with a flax-bound raft, nor wrestle against the highest of the mountains, as though it were something nobler, but, excelling in courage and judgment, prevail everywhere — with the fairest provisions of all, I think, and purely from home; for these alone, of what men have, are theirs through to the end, while the rest lie common before all, so to speak, gifts of fortune — or, if you will, of virtue. For they belong to the worse too from the beginning, but they are kept, reasonably, by the better. So they tested the whole empire, and shook it, and brought matters to such a pass — those enrolled in the Persian to such contempt, and the city to such confidence in all toward her — that the Libyans about Pharos were stirred, the Egyptians revolted along with them, and the king, though he seemed to fare in the rest as he wished concerning them, lost no small part of Egypt, the marsh-land — though before he had twice already taken all of it. And the matter of the triremes from Athens was like a kind of bolt from heaven. For alone of men who have lived in a commonwealth, they reckoned their own land as though it were another's, and another's land as not theirs, but as belonging to those who held it in wickedness. They lived the life of guards — and not of guards stationed in one place, nor patrols of some single spot, but those men one must call patrols of the whole Greek world; and they chose as enemies not the weakest, but those most able to endure the most, moved by two things: one, that nothing of the extreme — so far as concerns the judgment and preparation of the barbarians —
had been left undone to the Greeks but their not having suffered it, for which they must take vengeance, and in no small way; the other, that toward the rest of time there should be safety for Greece — until the king came to know that, in lifting his hand against the city, he was doing something like what one would do who, raised up against a great oncoming flame, wrestled with fuel. For there was nothing that he did not suffer, but he was consumed of himself, and perceived that he held the land as a fortress against his own safety; and he advanced upon the road, reckoning the third thing nobler than the first — or rather, more necessary. For at first he had desired to take Greece in addition, and the rest of Europe; but he perceived that he was in love with the impossible. Second was for him to preserve the empire he had; not even this did the city allow. He came to make safety itself the thing of greater worth, and he withdrew before the city by so much, from land and sea, not as the saying is "to back water," nor as to "give ground," but he gave up all the lower region, no fewer than myriads of stades of Asia — the whole being like a great empire — so that not only were the islands and the Greeks of every kind in them free, but those who dwelt in his own country were further from his dominion and rule than before were those of the old Greece. For he held before the region as far as the Peneus — and yet I have taken away the marvel, as though I were saying something marvellous; he held all as far as Attica, until he met those from Attica on the sea: so far had he passed the navel of the earth and of Greece, Delphi. But from the contests and expeditions of the city he came down to this, that he agreed to sail no longer within two bounds — setting the Chelidonian isles to the south and the Cyanean to the north — and to keep off the sea by five hundred stades on every side; so that this circle is, in place of any other, a crown above the head of the Greeks, and the king's guard set up from his own country.
Such was the war the city made against the barbarians, both on her own land and in theirs; and such, again, the peace she made, showing by both that it was not in pursuit of wealth, nor for the pleasure of gain, that she went on, but hunting this one thing: secure freedom for the Greeks from the barbarians. And yet what fairer chief-point of peace or of war could one name, whether against Greeks or against barbarians, than that with which the city then sealed her deeds? And these so many and such things she went through with many oppositions from the Greeks, all as it were pulling against her — the Lacedaemonians standing aloof in purpose, the Boeotians warring against her, the Aeginetans fighting against her at sea (whom one thing kept from being first at sea — the city, by far the victor); and besides these, the Corinthians stirred up through the Megarians and warring both by land and by sea, the Epidaurians and Sicyonians being counted with the Corinthians, the Naxians and Thasians and Carystians ill-advised about the alliance, the Phocians calling, the Lacedaemonians again calling, and a wonderful circle of affairs throughout Greece; so that, even if these alone had sufficed and we had only her Greek deeds of that time to relate, with no Median splendours present anywhere, they would suffice to fill the years for a narrative. For which one must especially rejoice with the city, not only for her strength, but for her greatness of spirit; for that, while at war and in rivalry of the Greeks against her, she gave up none the more her forethought on behalf of the Greeks, but warred against the king on behalf of the common interests through all land and sea — how great a greatness of spirit must one add to this? Apart from being so divided and reaching all things as if each alone — to furnish, of judgment, courage; and of
preparation, surpassing measure, for one to admire? For she so ordered her affairs against the barbarians, as one having all leisure from all else, and to those of the Greeks who troubled her it was no more possible to make use of the occasion, but she met these too in such a way as to be able to count off these victories, five and more together, like other things reckoned all at once. They conquered the Peloponnesians at sea off Cecryphaleia; they conquered the Aeginetans off Aegina, and the Peloponnesians again. For the Megarians they set up walls down to the sea, and at once preserved their freedom and their land; they conquered the Corinthians before Megara, and before twelve days had passed they conquered them again in another battle, when they were ignobly snatching away the trophy. And these things are not yet great; but it shall be told, even though I am pressed — for the addition will show the whole. For the powers of the city were away: the one for the need of the Egyptians, ships more than then were all the ships among the Greeks together, well-nigh; the other was set down before Aegina — which the more stirred their adversaries to set out for Megara. For they thought there was leisure of the Athenians for the deed against themselves; and if even the second engagement should be won, then she would have to break off another siege, that of Aegina, for there was no other place from which they would come henceforth. But these so laughed the sophism to scorn that the men at Aegina were no more moved than those in Egypt who had heard nothing, but the rest of the age — the oldest and the youngest — go to the help of Megara, and in two battles in succession appeared stronger than the prime of the Corinthians and Peloponnesians; so that those men now exactly conceded, and had nothing more to say, not even that they had not justly added these present things. And it seems to me that, by the goodwill and zeal of some god toward the city, this second affair was contrived, as in
a drama. For if they had departed as men struck once, there might perhaps have been some later rejoinder for them; but to be reproached by their own people, and, reproached, to go out again, and, setting up a trophy greater than the former, to add to their suffering — this made them themselves set their seal upon the victory, so that the deed should not seem to be judged by fortune rather than by the account of the better, both now and before. So they did not make trial of a third — though they themselves forced the contestants together at the Isthmus.
Are these things, then, all we can tell of those men? Surely we should rob them of many great things. They sailed round the Peloponnese — not to speak of it simply as naval circumnavigations, but so as to master the strategic points of the country, and to defeat in trifling fashion those who stood against them, general after general. They crossed to the opposite mainland, all that they met giving way. Again, when the Lacedaemonians came over against the Phocians, the Crisaean gulf was closed, and they met them at the borders. And apart from these, before Megara, they were in Geraneia; so that the Lacedaemonians had no resource, but were at a loss, standing among the Boeotians, where they might be saved: so did the city enfold them. And at last they engage at Tanagra in Boeotia, and when both proved men worthy of the daring, the Lacedaemonians seemed in this one point to have had the better — how shall I say it becomingly? For I shrink from saying that they were not destroyed. For this was the limit: for the Athenians, to close the pass; for the Lacedaemonians, to be saved home. And this deed comes near to being the only one in which flight has been a symbol of victory, since those who in the battle too were the stronger, and in the whole, without many of the earlier proofs, the things that followed at once showed. For there are three witnesses who attested on the spot that the victory was the Athenians':
Athenians, Lacedaemonians, Boeotians. For the Lacedaemonians were content to withdraw, the Athenians went forward hard upon the battle, and the Boeotians did not hold out, but, beaten at Oenophyta, bowed down, and with them the Phocians and Locrians, by a single victory. And from these the city took this penalty in return for their having sided with the barbarian in the common dangers of Greece. And there is another deed of hers worth telling, and this too shouting and showing aloud from afar whose it was. For when the earthquake about Laconia took place, and the perioikoi stood round the Lacedaemonians, and all the affairs in the Peloponnese were truly shaken as in an earthquake, the Lacedaemonians had no sooner called than the people was at hand under arms — bold in courage, but full of fear on their behalf as on behalf of its own safety; which both dissolved the present terrors for Lacedaemon and made ready to take vengeance on them hereafter. So nowhere is it possible to embrace the deeds or the darings of the city more than the character of her deeds, which marks the doers more exactly than a trophy. The expedition for the Milesians, and the sea-battles off Samos, and the chastened revolt of the Euboeans, and many other things, one may indeed pass over. And at last, having mastered all, she makes a peace worth recalling. For she did not make her treaty in the same manner toward the Greeks as toward the barbarians, but reversed it. For from those she took away all the lower country and the sea within the bounds I mentioned; but to the Greeks, what she had become mistress of in the war, this she gave back — Megara, Troezen, Pegae, all Achaea. By which it is clear that she made the peace while in the position of victor; for there was nothing she received in return, but she brought forth one and the same as a symbol of two things, both of surpassing in the war and of her inborn goodness — holding that against the barbarians one must war to
the utmost of one's power, but against the Greeks simply up to the point of superiority. Having so carried through the contest against the barbarians, and so again the contest against the Greeks, such a peace she made toward those, and such toward these, becoming superior to both together and apart. And indeed she alone of all cities, by her own dangers, procured a benefit common to the whole race; and she alone, out of common benefactions, acquired the leadership and altered the custom. For it was not from enslaving the cities that she got her rule, but from making them free; so that it came about that the same time brought to the Greeks the gain of freedom, and to the city the gain of rule. For they alone ruled the willing, and this people alone, like a single ruler chosen out of all, prevailed — forcing the barbarians with arms, and not persuading their kindred, but persuaded by them to rule, holding rule as a symbol of justice, not of injustice. And if one must put it with a distinction, she alone of cities got her rule with the barbarians unwilling, the Greeks asking for it.
When matters had thus advanced, for a while there was quiet, and the cities enjoyed the happiness they had; but of the common fortune of men, which moves all things, both the Greeks and the city had their share. For the one party did not keep gratitude through to the end for the good they had received, but envied the excesses of her deeds; and she, against those for whom she had undergone everything, clashed — showing by two things how unwillingly: by at first restraining them while they were still being stirred, and asking that the differences be judged by argument; and by, when forced to war, seeking nothing more when she had conquered, but letting go those who had contended with her about the leadership, and leading them out of prison no more unpleasantly than
she had thrown them in at the beginning when she prevailed. But what should one make of these things now? For I am ashamed even to leave out the sea-battles at Naupactus, which they won by no small margin and against no slightly greater numbers, but sailing as upon a windfall; and other victories on the Thracian coast, and how they rescued Corcyra, and the deeds about Ambracia, the greatest of the Greek deeds of that time — and these done by virtue, not by need; and the things at Pylos itself, sea-battles from land and land-battles afterward on the island; and, before these were done, other Lacedaemonians brought from Cythera, and trophies of Corinthians, and many other things, rivals both to tell and to admire. But the occasion does not bear it; it seems to me a thing of greater good fortune to hold it in. And further, as we said, we did not undertake to relate what the city has done as a bare history — for then the discourse would stretch into the next quadrennial festival — but to tell the most renowned of her deeds in the wars, and of the goods belonging to the city to leave out nothing, so far as possible. And these things consist not in our telling each thing through all, but in our leaving out no kind of praise. And as it seemed good to the deity that these things should not yet suffice for Greece, but that the cities should still be tossed both by land and by sea, and that some enemies should come from abroad, while others sailed abroad in their misfortunes — what Greek or what barbarian is there who could name others equal to those from this city? To whom it occurred to sail for the freedom of the Leontines, and they thought fit to risk themselves for that of the Egestaeans, and they purposed to cross against the Carthaginians, in return for the Carthaginians' having first crossed against the Greeks in Sicily; and they manned triremes and merchantmen, as though sending them out from all Greece. And the land-battles and horse-battles are perhaps less to be amazed at, because of the city's constant habit of
conquering, and because the portion of the better has been given to the city as a kind of prize in most things; but that, even when affairs went against her, she fell away none the more, but — with hoplites absent, with cavalry absent, equal to whom in number or virtue it was impossible to find; and with so many ships and missiles and equipment and arts and allies and, so to speak, all her furnishing removed elsewhere, as though all Sicily were just then being colonized, the acropolis emptied of well-nigh ten thousand talents, the Lacedaemonians and Boeotians and the rest now making their invasions not from the Peloponnese but from the heart of Attica, from Decelea, and the household slaves having removed, no fewer than to seem the full complement of a nation, and with impunity for desertion to whoever wished, and so great a war about the city — that she should display so great an abundance of endurance and at once of strength and of ambition as to send out another expedition to match the former, and rival generals, and think fit to besiege the Lacedaemonians there with the alliance — to what human soul can one compare these things, and what good fortune should one not rather admire? And when the great disaster had come — for I will not be silent, but this too seems to me to show the city still greater — she bore herself toward the remaining affairs as though she had taken all Sicily. For she did not resemble one stripped of power, but one who had just acquired it. And the easiness of her ways and her moderation and the order of her conduct, which they chose for the sake of conceding nothing shameful, no one could worthily tell. And when all the Greeks stood round them, and their existing enemies then for the first time took hope and were spurred on by fortune, and those from Sicily came upon them, and the alliance changed, well-nigh all of it, and islands and mainland and all, so to speak, became enemies and surrounded them on every side, and an unexpected piece of folly besides came about, so that even the king was
called against the city by those who had been saved from him by the city's deeds — and he joined in, very gladly, and warred with bodies and ships and gold, and what starting-point of land or sea did he not furnish for the war? — there was no one who, looking on from outside, would not have expected the city to be snatched up now at last, held fast in so common a war of barbarians and Greeks; but they so turned matters about, as though all these things were for them, not against them, or as though the enemy were their own generals. And, greatest of all, when even the constitution was shaken and certain of those at home were estranged from them, having no place where they had to stand except Samos — as in the Median danger they had Salamis — but coming, these too, in some other fashion to the same point as those of that time, and abandoning the city in its greatest part, they set right matters at home and mastered those abroad and parted the Hellespont with trophies, pursuing some in one direction, some in another, as though making rather practice-exercises among themselves than sea-battles against those they met. (It has been said, and I considered it, that this has been said before by another.) And at last, falling in at Cyzicus together with the Lacedaemonians and the men from Greece and the barbarians from Asia and Pharnabazus, they take the ships, all but as many as they destroyed; and when Pharnabazus tried to heal the disaster and brought up his cavalry, the one party fighting from foot on horseback, the other from the ships, they overpower all at once — fleet, cavalry, the archers from Sicily, those from the Peloponnese, the king's provision, the hopes of the Lacedaemonians; and the war was now empty for their adversaries, and everything was gone, as truly as from a shipwreck. So that the city which had been so far surpassed by faction did not even conceive the name
of peace in those times, while those who set out from so many and so great advantages, when struck, took refuge at once in peace. I have always, for my part, blamed those who reproach the city of the Lacedaemonians and think fit to do this on behalf of yours; for they make themselves hateful to those, and do not, as they suppose, adorn you. But, if one must say something paradoxical, they seem to me to do the opposite of what they wish; for they exalt those men more than they praise the city, and I think more thanks would come to them from those men for the slander than from you for the praises. For those men are not penalized by being called second to the city, but gain by being judged against the city; while you they do not glorify by declaring you the stronger, but by the very setting-side-by-side they seem not to know you; so that it is not unlikely that you should feel more displeased than the Lacedaemonians, whenever they contend in this way.
But since I have come to be in this part of the discourse, in which the cities are compared with one another, it is necessary perhaps to endure this too, that we may show not only in the contests how much the stronger the city is, but in the whole. For the Lacedaemonians will appear to have lost three hundred men and not endured it, but to have given way at once — which gives the city greater ambition than to have won the battle; for in that she became superior to those who stood against her, but here she became superior in things in which the rest gave up, almost all, as in games, when everyone yields. But she, having had so great a disaster afterward in Sicily, not only did not cower, nor gladly take refuge in peace, but so disposed her enemies that they would gladly have seen anyone able to persuade the city to keep peace. And when they heard of Conon's siege in Mytilene, they were not dismayed, but, sailing to Arginusae with fewer ships than anyone would have guessed, fewer
nevertheless than their adversaries, they ranged themselves with their whole fleet against the enemy's, as though someone else always furnished them the triremes, and made their trials in the Carian rather than in their own bodies; and they took no thought either of the multitude of those arrayed against them, or of Callicratidas' reputation, or of islands held, or of fortune by now, so to speak, estranged; they were not beaten by the storm, nor did they take thought how much of the war was left, but, as though it were enough to look upon the sea, they rout the Lacedaemonians, master all the Peloponnesians, take some triremes and sink others, fighting at once against the thunderbolt and the enemy, and so changed the siege; and, greatest of all, they rescue the man who alone afterward sufficed to dissolve the dominion of the Lacedaemonians. And those, as though all conquered at sea, again begged for peace; so the city was wont then not only to conquer those present in the contests, but also to amaze the rest and to conquer through all. And indeed she will appear both to have won the greatest victories of any, and to have borne her misfortunes so that one would rather admire the city's good courage in dangers than the deeds of the conquerors; so that it occurs even to me to say this: that, conquering in her good fortunes, she has excelled no less in those in which she failed, since no one has borne misfortunes in like manner. Of her conquering in what she achieved — apart from what she did against those who opposed her in politics — there are two indissoluble signs: for what she did by herself surpasses what was done privately by any, so far as not to be missed; and what was done when they were on the same footing all together fall short. And indeed in difficulties too she has become superior to the conquerors; for they gave way, but she has been shown to hold out against fortune. Therefore she carries off both victories by no small margin, and conquers
the cities alike in what she achieved and in what she failed.
And indeed she herself has mastered nations and cities at once, but no one has mastered her except with many allies. And further, she has been compelled to war against all together who came against her or stirred against her, while of her adversaries most have held out against a part of her, and few or none have made trial of her power gathered together. So the city of the Athenians has conquered many things many times, yet she herself is, equally, unconquered. And, greatest of all, no one has mastered her — for no one has brought her judgment to terms, but all such misfortunes have been those of an army — while she herself has enslaved the judgments of her adversaries together with their deeds: making Xerxes flee from his affairs as a thing to be prayed for, and laying the Lacedaemonians low — those who heard of it no less than those present in the battles and stumbling. And one might know that the case of these cities is not equal nor alike, either in the greatness of the deeds or in the darings or in anything whatever of their possessions. For the Lacedaemonians, having met misfortune at Leuctra, did not recover, but it was for them like a man's death. For they refused to make peace with the Thebans, thinking it a becoming misfortune to yield to the city of the Athenians alone; but mingled with the rest of the Peloponnesians, they were no more able to save others than they needed the rest to save them — and yet the city sufficed them for the greatest thing, not to be snatched up once for all, as by the onset of a hurricane or some whirlwind. But the city, cheated in the sea-battle at the Hellespont, and stripped of her ships and her walls, and after this using faction within herself, and with the Lacedaemonians doing nothing moderate, took from them, through one man, the rule of the sea, and herself stood at the head of Greek affairs, as though just coming forward from the Median wars. So not only did she bear the reverses of war more nobly than others bore their good fortunes, but also her
troubles at home she so handled that she is a measure of self-restraint for all men, and no one has been able, even later, to find anything better than what was done by them. She showed it both in the overturning of the constitution under the Four Hundred, which she dissolved without a sound, and in the war against the Thirty, which became no greater against more than after those men. And indeed of self-restraint and daring at once no men have brought forth clearer tokens — those who, being a little more than fifty, the first to resolve these things, undertook to risk themselves at once against the dominion of the Lacedaemonians by land and sea and against those in the city itself, thinking they must either live in freedom or not look upon the sun, which had become a witness of cowardice for them. And when they had contended against those from the town, and ranged themselves against the Lacedaemonians, and held the Piraeus, and become for men a pattern of hope in dangers, the people, now gathered together, came at once to blows and well-nigh to words, as though each side would war on behalf of the other, not on its own behalf; so that one could not determine whether it belonged to the enemy to curse the faction, or to the well-disposed to join in praying for the city, since it was dissolved in this fashion. For it sickened by the nature of all men, but was healed by its own; so that this too has brought it emulation rather than misfortune. And I wish to say only this much further about those men: that in daring they surpassed not only the Lacedaemonians, but well-nigh even their ancestors at Marathon. For those, even if far inferior to their adversaries, yet took courage being in a body of considerable number; but these, the whole being a little more than those against whom they fought the tyrants, seized Phyle. And those, while the city flourished, conquered strangers and barbarians; these, when she had fared otherwise, conquered the Lacedaemonians, rulers of the Greeks, and those from the town, their own. And having conquered
their enemies by good courage, they conquered their own people by fairness. Using both — the courage in the contests and, after the deeds, the resolving of what must be resolved — they so recovered the city that, if one wished not to relate everything, one could conceal the misfortune that befell in the war: so did they both choose and accomplish what followed in keeping with the deeds above. And yet, by how great an abundance must one think this city surpasses that one, to which, when she was stripped of all, the Lacedaemonians were so far inferior?
But what is no less worthy than any of their deeds to tell and to honour: when the Lacedaemonians demanded what they had lent the Thirty against the people, then, when they had come to terms, the people paid it off jointly, that they might confirm the compact by deed. And indeed how the Lacedaemonians dealt with one another we could not tell — for they hid it; but the city, besides so settling its own affairs with many witnesses, became a pattern for the rest. The multitude of the Argives, at any rate, when later it sickened, she healed by deed and word; for, sending to them and reminding them of her own affairs, she reconciled them. They appear, then, to have administered alike their own affairs and the common affairs of the Greeks, alone of all; for they thought they must rescue the Greeks not only from enemies, but also relieve them when sick among themselves; and they themselves, prepared both against the wars abroad and against the troubles at home, were seen to be beyond hope. Not, then, that those coming from elsewhere and far younger were arrayed against autochthonous and older men; nor that the city taught others; nor that, though taking forethought for nothing but war, the city won more in other things than in this — not these alone show the inequality, but also that in the very affairs and occasions of war she appears to prevail so far,
whether things go well or otherwise, as the things said make clear and as one may see from what we shall add. For I feel toward the deeds of the city as men feel toward those in their prime: for the deed that ever shows itself appears to me the fairest, and I set this down according to the discourse. These things, then, some god would judge well; but I, as I promised, will go through the most renowned of the rest, from which one may at once reckon the judgment and the power of the city. One war, and a first strange and wonderful one, she undertook on behalf of the Thebans. For when the Lacedaemonians, judging the rest mere play, as though you were exhausted, began their dominion from their own allies and proclaimed a garrison against the Thebans, both things astounded the Greeks; for the city had never used bitterer enemies, nor again had the Lacedaemonians used allies at once more eager and more able against that very city, not only at the beginning and the middle of the war, but even at the last, when it was over. Yet the people did not rejoice at what was happening, nor again blame the inopportuneness in that they had as yet neither ships nor wall; but, as though where the Lacedaemonians moved, there they had to be those who met them, throwing the city into the midst of the dangers of war, beside the very memorials of their misfortunes, they went out to Haliartus against Lysander and Pausanias and rescued Boeotia. And then indeed Lysander exactly perceived that he had not, as he supposed, conquered the city of the Athenians, but had only dreamed, much as children dream; for she had at once recovered from her misfortunes, while he was not administering the affairs of the Greeks, but lay among the rest. And not long after, a penalty Greek and befitting the city overtook the Corinthians too, and these also flee to the city — whom anyone would have guessed, from the circumstances, that, do them whatever harm she might, she could never think she had taken sufficient vengeance; but they, judging concerning these as concerning the Thebans, go to the help of Corinth, as one would on behalf of one's own land; and, the war being
great and continuous at Corinth, having faced danger in front in many battles, and walled them in, and guarded both them and the city through all, they added that noblest thing: for, holding Acrocorinth and being able to seize the city when they wished, they did not take it nor resolve to, showing by deed that they were warring for the cause of those they championed, not doing anything privately for themselves. And at last they brought the Lacedaemonians to such a strait that they take refuge again with the king of the Persians and through him make the much-talked-of peace, giving up the Greeks dwelling in Asia — about whom I make no accusation; but if one should ask them whether they conceded these things willingly or by compulsion, if they shall say willingly, they must say they betrayed them — and who would believe it? but if unwillingly and by necessity, they admit, surely, that they were beaten by the city in the whole; for they would not, if they had any resource in their affairs, have then deliberately taken on such shame. So that, by the only argument left to them, they themselves bear witness that the city then had the advantage in the war — and that no small one. And since I have mentioned the peace, I wish here again to go back a little. For of the two things by which cities are judged, war and peace, and both of these having come to the Greeks against the barbarians, in war the city so excelled that what she alone accomplished is the greatest of the deeds — or, if one set it among the later, she so far surpassed those who shared as if she had contended by herself. And apart from these, she is witnessed by the three occasions: for the first deeds of the war she accomplished alone; in the second, having risked herself in front even against the king, she carried off the prizes of valour; and the last are her own — the sea-battles and land-battles about Cyprus and Pamphylia, and the long course; so that she alone and first conquered the barbarians, and
having joined with others, she conquered her fellow-combatants no less than her adversaries — and she alone remained. But indeed, how great the difference of the peace! For the city's peace lays commands upon the king and says that he too must do what is bidden; for it does not let him sail within the Chelidonian and Cyanean isles, and "if you pride yourself on your cavalry, you shall none the more drive as far as the sea, but you shall keep off the sea," it says, "by a day's ride of the very cavalry, and you shall obey concerning the Greeks alike, both those in Greece and those in your own land." These things the city's peace says; the other says that the Greeks dwelling in Asia shall obey the king, and that he shall do concerning them whatever he wishes, and it has added that he should define what is just for the rest. Is the chief-point equal, or the difference small? Is it not the whole opposite?
Again, the dealings with the Greeks and the resolving of the wars among them. The city, then, sent back with peace the Lacedaemonians she had taken, doing them no harm, as though it were enough to have conquered by virtue; but those of the Lacedaemonians in the Hellespont — for so it is decent to say — whom they took in the sea-battle, the Athenians being outwitted, they slaughtered out of hand; and I add nothing more, and that with the pattern at hand from home, how the city is toward the unfortunate; yet not even so did they imitate it — so far were they from being able to have shown it first themselves. And further, those thought nothing enough, but went as far as the demolition of the walls; while the city, having conquered all the Peloponnesians in the upper times, when she recovered Euboea, did not advance further, but gave back willingly even what she had gained beforehand in the war — Megara, Nisaea, Troezen, Achaea, Pegae. And it seems to me that the matter of the captives, and everything of the kind altogether, is a sign of a twofold virtue in the city, not, as one might say, merely of humanity. For those, I think, with whom such things
succeed beyond hope or power, cling to their present fortune, as those unable to hunt do not let go what is unexpectedly caught, nor, even if one should think fit to ransom it, would they value it at its worth, but, adding their own incapacity, they exact more. But she, I think, conscious that she was the stronger in the whole, never haggled, hoping for what was absent on equal terms with what was present; so she gave back everything to the enemy more easily than they demanded their own. And indeed which single Lacedaemonian mastered the city, not a man could say — where they did not even master her acting in common, alone; while one Athenian man took from the Lacedaemonians the rule of the sea, alone of men having been general at once with the king and for the city — or rather for the Greeks. For doing no wrong whatever to the one who trusted him, he walled the city and freed the Greeks, conquering the Lacedaemonians by island and by city. Now the very rule of the sea the city acquired from her conquests over the barbarians, the natural enemies; they from the city's misfortunes. Having acquired the rule, the one so ordered each thing that he who administered it was called just by the Greeks themselves, alone of the Greeks, on this account, and there is no need of any further symbol of the title which the city then acquired through him; the others so disposed those who gave themselves up that they made the noblest defence of all men on behalf of the charges that arose against the city from some at certain seasons; and the cause was not cruelty, nor what one might say of those readily accustomed to censure, but the not reaching, in their natures, as far as the equal. And indeed the one held their rule more than seventy years, the others did not preserve it even for three Olympiads; so that it truly could not have been otherwise, unless they had received it at the first when the Olympians brought it forward.
These are the very things at which I am vexed when men wish to compare. Perhaps, then, I too seem to some to do an absurd thing — finding fault, yet myself having advanced into the like discourse, and having said the very things for the sake of which I say one ought not to speak. Yet from these very things one would most see that the favour is not wonderful which they think to lay up for the city, nor are such things to be contended for on purpose. So that if anyone thinks fit that these things should be unspoken by us too, well-nigh for this reason it has been said; and apart from this, the speeches have come about without slander and for the sake of the need that fell in the way. For there was no other way to show what I had set out to show, so that out of the very things I was fleeing, from these I was led to speak. For the Lacedaemonians seem to me to feel toward the city what Teucer in Homer feels toward Ajax. For he too, fighting in front of the rest, withdraws to Ajax and through him appears, and likewise is also hidden; and the Lacedaemonians, who excel the Greeks and fight in front in their needs, are to be compared as children to the city. And the proof: of all their possessions and deeds, the greatest are those they have shared with the city; and of these, what they did apart they failed in, but what they did with those from the city they accomplished most gloriously of men. So through the city they are both shown and again hidden. Yet I have been led against my own intention into these speeches, so that I would have wished even the trophies I am about to mention to stand dedicated to the city from others, and that it should not be necessary to add to most of them "from the Lacedaemonians." But as it is, the very facts lead this way, so that it will be said not for the sake of comparison, but that the deeds may not be wholly passed over; for there are some I have left out — and there is need, it seems, of no ordinary course.
They conquered, then, at Lechaeum, and destroyed well-nigh the whole army; they took the forts in Corinth and drove out the Lacedaemonians established there and razed the walls; they went into Arcadia and as far as Laconia, and shut up those in Phlius, and set up a trophy of those who came out against them, and again over the Mantineans and Sicyonians in the plain and over the allies; they sailed along as far as Byzantium, and made the whole region about Thrace their own, and conquered the remaining harmosts and garrisons at Methymna and off Abydos. And they had so great a superiority that they even reconciled the kings of the Thracians. And when the unexpected disaster about the Cadmea took place, they alone of the Greeks kept both the justice of the shameful peace and the noble and truly just things of the Greeks, marching out against the Lacedaemonians — of both of which what greater thing can one say concerning the city? For they conceded the peace last of the Greeks, and not before they knew that they must war not only against the Lacedaemonians and at the same time the king and Seuthes and Dionysius and the Peloponnesians — for against this they were prepared — but also against their own allies; so betrayed were they; and not even so did they endure it with all the votes, but they condemned those who had persuaded them, holding it against their own nature and not lawful that any Greek whatever should consent to obey the king before the trophies. And when, even against this peace, they went into Thebes — of those whose name on such occasions I shrink from speaking — not only first of the Greeks, but also alone, they laid hold of the matters as though seizing a windfall, and displayed not one kind of benefaction, but left out no kind of benefaction: receiving the exiles, and arranging the deed for them and rehearsing it beforehand like a drama in their midst, and giving exemption and citizenship and a share in all things,
as to those who had removed from Corinth and Thasos and Byzantium. Then, when there was need also of help through arms, they went out, well-nigh all of them, as though about to share in a procession and not in dangers, imitating their former going-out, and in purpose even surpassing it. For then they went out though they had no alliance with the Thebans; but in these times, even when the pillars about the alliance had been thrown down by the Thebans, yet they did not reckon up their folly against the need, nor were they more angry with those who justly faced danger than with those who unjustly attacked. And, using such brilliant reasoning, they set a fitting end upon it. For they conquered by no small margin, nor so as merely to frighten the Lacedaemonians, but, casting out the garrison and the harmosts under truce, they brought the city back up to its original rank. And this contest they took up on behalf of the freedom of the Thebans; the next, on behalf of their very preservation. For when the Lacedaemonians were spurred on by what had happened, and came on with the whole alliance, they ranged themselves before the city of the Thebans, setting against them generals more fearful to them than those that they furnished with Agesilaus, and becoming through all the saviours of the city. And all sorts of things stand round me, as in a history of those same times, which not only is it not easy to go through all, but not even all of one general in order. Which of them, passing by, shall I mention? The sea-battle at Naxos, so great a deed? Or the contests about Corcyra? Or the things done on the Thracian coast on behalf of the Greece there? Or those in Acarnania? Or those everywhere? Or, leaving aside all the rest, shall I tell that which I hold greatest and most wonderful and alone truly worthy of the Athenians to have done — that, when the Thebans, having mastered the Lacedaemonians at Leuctra, planned to destroy them, and
matters had been left in such a state for the Lacedaemonians that either some hand of a god had to be held over them, or the city had to inherit the dangers that were theirs, willingly — and yet a herald had come at the very beginning from the Thebans, crowned as for good tidings, and the whole Peloponnese had come, giving itself up, bidding them lead for the destruction of Sparta, and threatening, if not, to join the Thebans — yet they, at the herald's words, so wept as though hearing of some misfortune of their own, and sent him off as one come from the barbarians, cheated of his hope most utterly; and they chose the desolation of the Lacedaemonians instead of the voluntary alliance of the Peloponnesians and the friendship of the conquerors, not remembering what they themselves had suffered, but thinking it their own business to dissolve what the Lacedaemonians would suffer if overlooked. And what is most worthy of admiration in their nature, and to be reckoned greater than human: for, when it was possible for them to have the Lacedaemonians follow them both by land and by sea, or to overlook them thrust headlong down — allies, perioikoi, household slaves, all risen up — they received them on equal terms; and when the power of the Thebans was advancing like a flame against the city of the Lacedaemonians and the rest of the Peloponnese, they alone, of Greeks and barbarians, standing in front, prevented it. From which they were so regarded by all that the city became the council-chamber of the whole alliance.
I marvel, then, at those who dare to bring forward against the city the cases of the Melians and Scionaeans — where on earth or sea are they when they make these accusations? Have they heard only these of the deeds of the city of such a character, or would they not have wished both these and all else that belongs to the city to belong to their own fatherlands? For if they shall say they would not wish it, let them show in turn what they pride themselves on; but if they would not flee the choice, were some god to offer it them, let them stop putting their hand to arguments greater than themselves. And further,
do they accuse the city or what befell? For if the city, they know nothing, it seems, of the greatest things, but the things by which the city is known have escaped them; and if they blame what befell, then, thinking the things the city chose unlike the others, they so blame her that, out of the very things by which they disparage the matter, they praise the city. For then the wickedness of a city or of a private man is shown, when either the blameworthy things alone belong to one, or when one convicts him of more or greater bad things than fair ones — let it be added. But when, examining through all, one finds one and two, you are, without knowing it, praising by what you let pass — especially if you make the judgment not even of a private man, but of a city, and that the oldest of the Greek cities, and the one to which most of what is fitting has befallen. But if one must answer about these too, I will not say how those who later were able dealt with these very same matters; for I have not set out to grieve any of the Greeks, but the discourse is dedicated to the race of the Greeks as a common ambition; nor, if I show others having done greater and more terrible things, is this a defence on behalf of the city, but rather a confession taking refuge in pardon; I have no need, then, of such a defence. But it seems to me that those who bring forward such arguments have altogether been ignorant of the nature of affairs, and dwell, as it were, outside the inhabited world. For how could one say they reason moderately about realities, or how they ought to discourse about empire, if they have first been ignorant of this — its nature? For all empire, surely, belongs to the stronger and is contrary to the very law of equality; or else, how is it equal, or where is it just, either to levy tribute from another's land, or to lay laws on those who need none, or to judge their affairs, or to command, or to make war, or to acquire what does not belong to one? For in general none of these things
comes about on terms of equality. So that if anyone is precise about justice and wishes to be a sophist rather than to concede to the nature of things, he might as well strike out simply all rule and power; for all these things are within the law of the stronger. Then, out of wisdom, let him go up as far as the gods, refuting, and saying that not even these deal with men on equal terms, but have chosen to be stronger. But, I think, these are the views of men worthy of a corner and who have not seen the sun, which takes from the other stars the power to shine. And if it is necessary that such things attend all dominion and all abundance, and this is the law of empire — not to be judged on equal terms with the subjects — then let one go off victorious when he has shown that any whatever of the other powers, whether Greek powers or barbarian kingdoms, used a smaller measure of advantage-taking than one can find with the people of the Athenians. For she will appear, in what she deliberated with surpassing nobility, to have used the character of one man, the best; and in what some bring as charges, not to have erred against the common nature of men, but to have followed the necessity of empire — and, by power having become ruler at the first, by humanity, fearing the burden of empire, to have willingly let it go, and well-nigh to have herself become the cause of the charges against her. For having used, toward all, the greatest commonness and moderation, and in a way having made men sharers rather of the constitution than holding them down by the law of dominion, she suffered the same as the kindly among masters; for it was not for her other fairness that she got thanks from some, but if she compelled anything, she conspicuously seemed to use force. And indeed, if she appears to have done these things to men holding the rank of subjects, let us grant it to those who wish to slander; but if to those who had revolted and outraged her beyond their desert, and to those who were openly enemies — which of the two is it worth accusing? I think those who furnished the necessity; since those men too seem to me, as if having this very thing as a pledge,
to have been exalted, and, trusting most in this, to have erred — not in thinking they would master the city through to the end, but in thinking that, even if taken, they would suffer nothing terrible, since the Athenians are by nature savers. And it is plain: for the things they changed their minds about concerning the Mytilenaeans — what city can conquer with what she resolved at the first? For what those decided on the first day belonged to the judgment, and to the wrongs they had suffered; what they changed their minds about on the next day belonged to the city alone, and the trireme had overtaken the trireme. And I marvel if all men honour the defence of private men made by deed, while the solemn ones do not see by what and how great deeds the city has defended herself concerning these matters. And of sun and moon we do not accuse what harm they do, but admire of what goods they are the causes; yet shall we judge the city by the things in which she offended some, and not by those in which she dealt with all, nor from her whole nature? I think not. As though one should accuse the gods of the thunderbolts and the thunders, and if anything be shaken, neglecting to consider their whole and common benefactions. The city, then, made the Scionaeans homeless, but saved all the Greeks both in common and severally — and that ten thousand times. And I would gladly inquire of those who lightly think fit to accuse themselves of such great matters, whom they say she made homeless such as she prevented the Thebans from being made homeless, or whose walls she razed such as she set up for the Corinthians, or whom she destroyed such as the Lacedaemonians and the cities with them whom she preserved — by many other ancient and noble deeds, and at the last by the cavalry-battle about Mantinea, the best of the Greek ones, and, I think, of those that are remembered.
But what is, as it were, the chief-point of those times, and what set the seal upon all the city's deeds, both the earlier and those of that time —
for when Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily and ruler of many of the cities in Italy too, conceived the design of attacking Greece, weakened by the length of her wars — partly having long courted the barbarians neighbouring the Greeks, partly calling in the king of the Persians, and the matter now coming to a boil — two Athenian generals checked the attempt: the one taking all the ships sailing in from Sicily, men and all; the other defeating the Lacedaemonians at sea off Leucas and making the sea his own. For she alone of cities did not bring in a tyrant, did not admire wealth, did not security, did not exchange pleasures for justice, but, as one made by nature to live for all, so she conducted herself. And accordingly all who desired the rule of the Greeks spent their lives warring against the city. And Philip overlooked the rest of the Greeks, and some he persuaded by hopes and gifts to work with him; but against the city he continued warring from the beginning, as though filling out some necessary boundary. And she, so long as she was able, rescued some, and to others stood in the place of a fatherland, and, like a mother, toiled in advance for all on behalf of her children, and alone preserved the symbol of Greece and overshadowed the misfortunes that then held it; but when matters declined, there was nothing in Philip's way, and it was clearly shown that both the victories of the city are the victories of the Greeks, and the reverses of the city are the reverses of all the Greeks. For they did not give up the leadership to Philip before the city accepted the peace. And though I have much of the later times to tell, and strange battles and wonderful darings and extraordinary endurances, I no longer see the occasion sufficing. So much only I will add to the discourse about these things and have done: four wars, to divide them by kind, the city has made — some her own
private wars, some on behalf of the common cause of Greece, some on behalf of those who in turn asked her help; and among these very suppliants are some by whom she had been wronged and against whom she had charges from before. I say, then, that this one figure of war by itself convicts all the Greek deeds together of being later. For more are those whom the city, after they had behaved senselessly toward her, saved, than those whom she remembered with resentment though they had rather done her good — I mean the Thebans from the Lacedaemonians, the Corinthians from the Lacedaemonians, the Lacedaemonians from the Thebans, the Euboeans from the Thebans, when she brought forth tokens of a twofold virtue, preserving for some their cities and the land of which she had been deprived by them, and releasing under truce those whom she had conquered; again the Euboeans from Philip, the Byzantines, the Perinthians, the Chersonesites, the Chalcidians on her own part, and ten thousand others. In return for which, if one had to make an image of the city, as of a private man, it would befit the Athenians' alone, and to be honoured like a common statue of Greece. For what the prytaneion is to the city, this the city has become to all the Greeks in common in their needs, ever furnishing themes fairer than the trophies and the inscriptions.
But what has been done apart from dangers, and yet no less than any shows what the affair of the Athenians ever was, escaped us in the earlier discourse, but now perhaps it is no worse to render. For when a compact had been made by them with the Lacedaemonians — that, if they mastered the barbarians, they should destroy those who had medized — when the dangers had passed, they forgot the enmity. And the Lacedaemonians, set on doing what had been resolved, they prevented, seeing the multitude of the cities by which Greece was going to be made smaller; so that not only to the common race of the Greeks, but even to those who from the beginning had erred both against herself and against the Greeks, the city was ever, at some time, of profit, and whatever she conquered she conquered exactly on behalf of all.
And about these things enough. But what no one, so far as we know, has until now mentioned in the common praises, this I will not cease until I have said. For, just as it seems to me not lawful, when one adorns deeds with speeches, to pass over the mention of the part that concerns speeches themselves. For alone of all men, as the saying goes, you have set up a bloodless trophy — not over Boeotians, nor over Lacedaemonians, nor Corinthians, but over all your kindred — I mean, not as one would name Greeks set in distinction against barbarians, but over the common race of mankind — and you have won an honoured and great victory for all time, not like the disputed battle at Tanagra, nor, by Zeus, like that at Marathon, which conquered so greatly, but truly the one befitting man, and lasting, and which it is pious to call a child of Zeus. For all the cities and all the races of men have inclined toward you and your way of life and your tongue. And the power of the city is not held together by garrisons stationed about, but because all on purpose have chosen your ways and adopt themselves, so far as possible, into the city, praying that both their children and themselves may have a share of the noble things among you. And neither do the pillars of Heracles hinder, nor are these things bounded by the hills of Libya, nor again by whichever Bosporus you will, nor by the straits of Syria and Cilicia, but over all the earth, by some divine fortune, there comes an emulation of your wisdom and your custom, and all men have held this one tongue to be the common tongue of the race; and through you the whole inhabited world has become of one tongue. And you would see charioteers and herdsmen and those who live by the sea and all the nations, whether by cities or by countries, holding fast to your tongue and trying to lay hold of the soil, like those unable to swim. This testimony I say, men of Lacedaemon
and all Greeks — and from yourselves and from the foremost among you in particular — is paid to the city still now, every day, of her victory; for they have abandoned their ancestral tongues, and would be ashamed even to converse among themselves in the old speech with witnesses present; but all have come to this one, thinking it a kind of boundary of culture. This I call the great empire of the Athenians — not two hundred triremes, or more, nor Ionia, nor the Hellespont, nor the Thracian coast, which has changed ten thousand rulers. For so great was the difference of these speeches from all others from the beginning, and it was made still more manifest in time, that not only, when the others have well-nigh died out by now, do these so flourish, but one might even say that all the speech of the others — and not only of barbarians, but of the Greeks themselves — resembles the babblings of stammering children, compared with that which comes from you. For up to two or three words one might listen and be pleased, as in a game; but for the rest there is already surfeit, and everything is found wanting; but this alone is proportioned to all festivals, to all assemblies and council-chambers, and besides suffices for all occasions and places and is equally becoming; for it alone, well-nigh, possesses the two first things, I mean solemnity and grace. And indeed, of the contest through all, and the strain and the running and the mastery, who could come near, bringing another tongue, and not depart truly like a child beaten by a man — that I may put it becomingly? For all poetry from you is the best and most perfect, both whatever excels in solemnity and whatever in graces. And if one must mention Homer too, the city shares in this ambition as well, not only through the colony-city, but because his speech too is plainly from here. And all the kinds of prose among you are the best, and those which the men from you composed; and well-nigh all who have conquered through all among the Greeks have conquered
by the power of the Athenians. And if there is anything in our own case too — this is now, the gods being gracious — this also refers to you, so that one cannot convict the speeches of being foreign; for, as though nature had foreseen from the beginning how far the city would surpass the rest in deeds, she furnished her speeches worthy of it, that she might both be adorned by her own goods and, if she should need any of the others, have this too to give along with the rest. Before, then, you saved those of the Greeks who fled to you; but now you simply uphold all men and all races by the fairest of benefactions, becoming leaders of all culture and all wisdom, and purifying all men everywhere. For in the Eleusinian rite you are called, for those who come, interpreters of the holy things and guides of the mysteries; and through all time you stand, for all men, the interpreters and teachers of the sacred offerings brought into the midst. In return for which you draw all men with fitting incantations — not stirring them with the charm-wheel, but with the fairest of remedies, with speech, which the gods gave to man alone of all creatures as worth all things. So that the other cities, which each men honour, they would, I think, place after their own fatherland; but in the case of the Athenians it is reversed, and all would say they honour not yours after their own, but their own after yours, as this being the one truly their own and prior — and not a single one would feel envy. For just as it is the custom to honour the gods even before parents, as being the common parents and benefactors of all, so it is pious to honour the common fatherland of the race before one's own.
It is fitting, then, to tell also how great is the reverence that is and has been from all toward this city, and through all times always. For not only when Greece flourished was she thought worthy of the first place, but also in the changes there is none that has come to be equal to her. For Philip, prospering by the battle of Chaeronea, at once seized the city of the Thebans with a garrison, but the city of the
Athenians he did not even endure to look upon, but stood in his place out of reverence for the stronger. And I am silent about Alexander, how he was ever deferential toward her. And the present empire of land and sea — may it be immortal — does not refuse to adorn Athens in the rank of teachers and nurturers, but so great is the abundance of honours that the city now fares as differently as she does not occupy herself with affairs. And the rest of her happiness is well-nigh like to what it was in those times when she held the rule of Greece — both in revenues and in precedence and in what has been conceded by all. And, most beloved of the gods of all: when the affairs of the Greeks flourished, she continued conquering both Greeks and barbarians; but in those things in which alone she seemed to have the worse in the later times, from these she came off so much more nobly and more fortunately in the end, that the cities of those others have perished, and such as are left are led by the law of empire and are subject as tributaries to tribute and the other necessities; but she was not so much diminished then, nor for so long a time, as, from then and through so long, she has been honoured up to this day, not only before those, but before all the others. And it is plain: for no one would take pride in Pella as his fatherland, nor in Aegae; but there is no Athenian of the Greeks who would not rather have been born a citizen of the existing city. And not only do private men thus prize Athens, but also the cities — those truly founded from here and by you — would more gladly say they are from you than acquire power equal to yours; and others go round in a circle, seeking somehow to trace themselves back to you. And indeed there is memory of five empires — and may there not be more; of these, in that of the Assyrians, the oldest, are the first deeds of the city, and whatever of the divine matters falls within this time; in the second the city was being raised up; the third she conquered through to the end; in the fourth she alone held out, and came off best
of the others. And in the all-best and greatest, the one now established, she holds the precedence of all the Greek world, and has so fared that one would not easily join in praying that she should have the ancient state in place of the present. And one might know how much the city excels through all the ages, if, taking her possessions — all of them perhaps not possible, or rather plainly impossible, but such as can be — and dividing them, assigning one to this country and city, another to that, one should then make a contest of the discourse, as of poets or choruses; for I do not think one would easily find the winner: as if one should pride herself on having first borne the race of men, another on having first shown the crops, another on having shared with most, another on having revealed laws, another festivals, another on lying among the fairest of land and sea at once, another on glorying in the goods of wisdom, another reckoning up the deeds in wars, another how many of the Greeks she received, another the colonies she sent out, another whatever of the city's possessions one might give her — I say that thus it would most become manifest by how great a superiority the city has surpassed the rest for you. For what suffices Greece when divided, this she alone has all together. And so, as in all things she has so great an abundance, so again in each she glories in many that bear toward the same point.
For instance, of the divine matters, at once two are first and greatest, the honour from the gods and the zeal toward the gods. And again, of the honour from the gods, should one tell of the visits, by which they honoured the community, or the nurtures, by which they reared those in office like their own children? Or the trials they held? And of the trials again, those they held against one another concerning the city, or those in the city against one another about their
- differences, or those held here mingled, with heroes and gods, with gods as judges? And of the gifts likewise it is not easy to find the greatest. Let city contend with city about these too — the one bringing the crops of Demeter, the other those of Dionysus, and these not only from the vine, but of the other cultivated fruits; let the third tell of the gift of Athena, and that twofold; is it not enough, when the gifts from the gods are divided among many cities, for each to pride herself as having the fairest? Again, the things toward the gods: on the one hand the temples, on the other the yearly sacrifices and processions, of which some came to be first among you, others to a surpassing degree still even now. And the unspoken rites, in which those who share seem to have their affairs better even after the end of life — who would not say it enough to set against all one thing? But indeed, of converse with men, what mode of benefaction has it escaped? First, the sharing of the crops; next, the other sharing of the rites; third, the championship in the wars; fourth, the help ever coming from wisdom to all, both for private houses and for the common affairs of cities. And of wisdom itself, shall we tell of the laws, which most still use, your laws, or of the discourses? And of the discourses, those concerning rhetoric, or the dialectical, or poetry, or the rest of prose — or, if you will, what kind of poetry? For whatever you name first or last belongs to the city as the first.
Consider, then, the matters of war too: on the one hand the private contests, on the other those on behalf of others; and again the successes at home, and again likewise those abroad, against Greek and barbarian alike; and which will you tell of, the courage or the humanity that is present in the very wars? For as in one spring all that you divide flows together again into one another and mingles — into the benefactions both the wars, by the need of those who asked, and
the goods from wisdom; and into the wars again both the private and those on behalf of those who asked. Again, then, of the wars, whether on their own behalf or on behalf of others, must one tell the sea-battles, or the land-battles, or the horse-battles, or the wall-battles? For in all these the city is supreme. Or, if you will, which of her deeds at sea is greatest, or which by land? Let three boundaries, then, be set for her, by which, if not herself, yet at least the rest she has indisputably surpassed: of land-battle, that at Marathon; of sea-battle, that at Salamis; of horse-battle — I am at a loss which to judge, but let it be that at Mantinea; of wall-battle no one has ever even disputed. And shall we set it down by the multitude of the trophies, or by the greatness of the deeds? Or how shall we render the worth? So both through all and through each she conquers in many ways. For she has made the most and greatest contests, and on behalf of the fairest things; and the most and fairest trophies are from Athens; and the most and fairest discourses, surpassing through all, are those of this city; and I will add, from here too the wisest and keenest and safest and most just generals, and more than all the Greeks together. And, to say it as a chief-point, by these three things the life of men is fulfilled: by abundance of necessaries, by the noble things of culture, by the equipment for war; for of the two seasons, peace and war, the one is common to both, one is set aside for the season of peace, and one makes men able to defend what they have. Of these, then, let whichever one wishes be greatest; and let it be granted that these belong to three cities, each to each: I say, then, that by whichever of them one judges, the conquering belongs to the city. For she will appear to have shown all and advanced in all things to the utmost; so by all the
judges she conquers, and over all the countries besides; so that one would not hesitate to say that she must be proclaimed first and second and third among the Greeks, as in the chariot-races — if indeed the chariot too is anciently from Athens, not from Sicily. Well, let these things be as they are.
But the matters of her greatness and her other equipment — who would not say they are worthy of her whole fortune and of the great name of the Athenians? On the one hand the very circuit of the town, the greatest of the Greek towns and the fairest anywhere. And I am silent about the walls that once came down to the sea, a day's road in their whole length, and other circuits by the sea answering to those about the city. But the demes one may surely behold, some of which are more splendidly furnished than cities elsewhere; and all the ornament, both from nature and from art, rivalling both in the city and in the country. Of the natural things, this air, choice out of much, and so many harbours, each one worth many. And further, the very position of the acropolis, and that which strikes one everywhere as gracious, like a breeze. And what is worthy of note in these very things: for other cities, however they may stand as to climate, are tolerably outdone by their own country; but, though the air of all Attica is thus, the air over the city is the best and purest. And one might know her from afar by the air over her head, as by a kind of radiance.
And the things from nature are such, with much of what exists left out. But of the things of art, what should one set greatest, or what tell first? For the temples here are the same — the greatest and fairest anywhere — and statues, apart from the heavenly ones, the first of the first art, both old and new; and besides these, treasuries of books such as nowhere else on earth
plainly, and very much a proper ornament of Athens, and, as befits the present license and manner of living, baths surpassing in solemnity and luxury, and race-courses and gymnasia; so that, if one should take away from the city the Erichthonii, the Cecropes, the things of myth, the things of the crops, the trophies on land and sea, the discourses, the men — all the things through which she has passed her age — and should consider her like the cities that now pride themselves on themselves, she would suffice to conquer by the things that are seen. And indeed some she has had, others she has, and she has neither been robbed of the memory of the things in which she excelled, nor again has she been left behind in her present happiness, if anyone cares to recall these too; but she alone of cities conquers her old things by the old, her new by the new, or, if you will, her old by the new and her new by the old — by her own, I mean, the things of others. And one might see her surpassings from this too: for all who have shared even some small part with the city pride themselves as the best of the rest; but she falls short of no ambition of any whatever, and has no one to share her own through to the end. For instance, the Argives think fit to be the oldest of the Greeks — so too the city of the Athenians; and altogether the old things of the Argives are not like those of the Athenians, nor would a single common judge say so. The Arcadians are autochthonous — after the Athenians, that is; and they are again conquered in the second things, by the discovery and gift of the crops. And it is plain from the Greeks bringing their first-fruits hither, not there. The Lacedaemonians are best in the matters of war — but so too the city of the Athenians; and at any rate the second place is set among them in ambition. The birth of the gods is a grace and honour to Thebes; of these, the one revealed his gift in Attica, and the other the Athenians first of the Greeks led in as a god, apart from the fellowships toward him through Theseus.
But indeed all remember the last strength of the Thebans — of this the city is the cause, and when she had to do the opposite, she did not fear. One might praise the Corinthians for justice; the city, then, has not only wished what is just, but has continued to arbitrate for the rest. The most renowned of all are the contests throughout Greece; and of these the oldest is that of the Panathenaia, or, if you will, that of the Eleusinia. Then the city's gift sets them all in motion — I mean, surely, the city's gift from Athena. The Samothracians glory in their rites, and these are the most named of all, except the Eleusinian; but Delos too is dedicated to the gods — and it belongs to the city. And the very fact that the road to Delphi is a work of the city, and that the Pythian mission is ancestral to the Athenians alone — what could you say but that all these things belong to the gods, who wish in every way to honour Athens and to lay the city's hand, as it were, on all the fair things? And further, there are some of the cities in Asia that pride themselves on the size of their temples, others on the construction of baths better than the need; and these things belong to the city to excess, as though she had been settled but lately. And the fairest thing: for what the rest are zealous to show in statues, of these you possess the temples and the theatres. Statues are admired, and of these too it prevails that the first is yours in the city — apart from the fact that the rest everywhere too belong, in a way, fittingly to the city. For of all the best things, it seems, she is the fatherland, and the leader of all wisdom and art, so that she surpasses not only in her statues, but in her statue-makers themselves.
But indeed, of the seven men — that we may not pass this over either — who became renowned for wisdom, one was from the city; and of the two best lawgivers, the one was this very man. And we have received that to two men of old a vote was given from the gods — to Lycurgus the Lacedaemonian and to
Socrates, who was from you; so that the city shares both in the ambition over common matters and in that over the highest, and there is none of the renowned to whom the name of Athens is not attached. If, then, one should ask which of the law-courts among the Greeks is most honoured and most holy, all would say that on the Areopagus. And what customs did men use most common and most popular? Those of the city of the Athenians, alike for Athenians and for all — one must say, if they are willing to tell the truth. And to demonstrate it through all needs much discourse and time; but you alone of all men held these three customs: to speak each year, at the burials, praises of those who had died on behalf of the city, and to rear their children at public expense until manhood, and then to send them off to their ancestral homes with full panoply; and to rear at public expense the incapable among the citizens. So that, honouring both ability and inability, you showed how each was fitting. And whence are decrees more brilliant or more humane? Of these the ones contained in what has been said I omit, but let one stand for me as a sample, so to speak, for the whole discourse about these things — the decree that prevailed against Arthmius of Zeleia; whom, when, serving the king, he brought gold into the Peloponnese, they voted an enemy of the people of the Athenians, both himself and his line, and dishonoured. And yet the things of all the others together fall short of this one alone. And embassies — most she received, and most she sent out. And whether this is altogether agreed, well; but if not, by the addition it becomes greater, for she sent out most on behalf of those in need. Now all the embassies by which she either persuaded the Greeks in common from time to time not to war with one another, or, sending out, consoled those in need, it is necessary to leave out for their multitude. But here too of two
I will make mention: for she stopped the Argives from faction among themselves, and reconciled the Cretans warring with one another. And of piety together with gentleness and high spirit, what fairer token could one tell? For when the Corinthians once voted not to receive the sacred mission from here at the festival, and even by an embassy forbade the city to send it, they adorned the envoys and the hoplites together and sent them out; and when they were at Eleusis, the Corinthians came making terms, and they sent the mission and brought the hoplites back. And indeed of the mysteries, some have been honoured as ancient, some as necessary, some as known to most. By all the votes the Eleusinia bear off the prize. And about the rest the discourse is not ours; but you alone of the Greeks hold each year a festival no meaner than any quadrennial one, and you receive at the Eleusinion more than others receive in their whole city; and all ever vie to make the present feast conquer in throng of men. But indeed Heracles and the Dioscuri all surely hold to be gods; and to these, while they consorted with men, the city first of all strangers shows the rites; so that those to whom we now do sacred rites, she is plainly the one who made them objects of worship. And of contests of the first rank this one city still now holds the most of all. And, to put it shortly, all things either are among you alone, or are also from you, and one of three things has come about: for some things began from you, others are fairest among you, others most in number. There are, then, some who, having nothing plain to show or to tell of their own deeds, nor anything on which they might justly pride themselves, take refuge in the Trojan times and dispute over ambition — not even so saying anything common to themselves, but hanging upon the glory of one man — like the Phthiotians and Pylians and Ithacans, like certain land-paupers making themselves out through one of the rich. But the city, besides
needing no such refuge, is not deprived of this seasoning either. But the common poet of the Greeks, in the catalogue of the ships and cities, says that the Athenian general came to the height in marshalling "horses and shield-bearing men." And, what is worth more and pure of praise: the others whom he praises, he praises according to the condition of the body, or in some other way as best, as it may chance, of the Achaeans, or of the so-and-so; he says at any rate "of themselves and of the horses that followed the Atreidae," and elsewhere he says, speaking of those then before Ilium, that one was best in archery. And Nestor says to certain of the brilliant men of his own day, "for already in time past I have consorted with better men than you" — and next he counts off many, as being again like to one another and none conspicuously surpassing them. But of Menestheus the poet uses no such addition, but, cutting away all these things at one stroke, says, "to him no man yet upon the earth was like." And a little above these things he tells of Erechtheus, how the goddess reared him, but the earth bore him. So perhaps it is not unfitting that the others, whom he defined as best in each kind with an addition — either of times or of races — he proclaims as themselves; but the one whom, of those sprung from the earth itself, he praises as best, this one he praises as best of all who have sprung in the earth. And again, setting down two of the Achaeans best in the matters of war, he means, surely, by the one of them the namesake from Salamis. And this too, surely, is told as a solemn thing concerning the constitution of the Lacedaemonians, that the god arranged their laws at the beginning; but this same god is plainly seen to have divided the tribes for the city and the clans, and to have ordained for each the fitting sacrifices, just as also he defined for them kings and magistrates and well-nigh the whole rest of the constitution. So that the god would be no less the lawgiver of the city than of them.
And I wish to make mention also of the constitution itself, briefly, so far as I am able; for all praise it, but no one well-nigh has searched out all that is in it. And I call it both simple and not simple. For of the three constitutions — to divide them at the highest — by whichever one would set it down, one sets the city. For at the beginning she will appear to have used kingships, for not a few generations, not only of the Erechtheidae, but of those later who were shown worthy; and democracy, again, both known to a child and the purest and greatest of all, is the one that has come to be among you. And indeed, looking to the council from the Areopagus, I think all would say that one could not take a fairer image of aristocracy, nor one that better preserves the name. So all the patterns of constitutions have started from here; for, as though legislating for men, that each should choose what suits his own ways, so she discovered all and set them forth in common, helping nature everywhere — which we show her to have done with respect to the crops and many other things too. And what is greater still and more perfect: the kings themselves will appear to have loved community beyond the others, and to have set themselves, most of all, on equal terms in their judgments toward the many; and the people, if it found anyone among the many surpassing, willingly set him over itself and used him as a continuing ruler, and kept this same custom toward the few too, if it perceived them better than the rest, but rivals among themselves; and likewise the council, ever looking to how it might make the people greater, and never reckoning its own advantage privately, but judging this both a fair and a real advantage for itself — to stand, with good repute, for the safety of the many. So that reasonably the city is of good repute beyond all the others not only in each constitution, but also in the blending of constitutions, in the
city's case. For just as this whole universe, I think, was composed of four elements, as the old saying goes, and each of these itself again shares by nature in the rest, but by its excess each kind has taken its name apart, so too the constitutions, even if they happen to be most of all distinct, naturally share somehow in one another, if indeed we are to see a kingship upright and just, or likewise a rule of the few or of the many. And one might know it, if one looked at the kingships in the city against the kingships somewhere else of the same times, whether of Greece or of the barbarians; and again the democracy at Athens against the democracies of others; and indeed the council's body against those that are sovereign and ruling somewhere else. For if one must, leaving the rest, speak about the democracy alone, all who have shared in this form will appear, in their wishes and desires, far more headlong and insolent, but in dignity and brilliance not even near to those born of the city. And indeed this the city first showed — not to set store by wealth nor to admire it. For she never exalted those who excelled in property, but thought she owed them only so much from herself as not to be wronged on this account; nor to those surpassing in virtue but inferior in money did she ever anywhere assign less — thinking it shameful, I suppose, that, while of household slaves men reckon best not the wealthiest but the most faithful, of free men, who claim that their worth is defined by money, it should be money and not what each man himself is, that he should be reckoned. And accordingly she alone of cities did not alter the ordinance, nor make what is by nature third first by law; nor, as one may see some of those who profess to philosophize speaking so about these things but in deed falling under and ever conceding to those whom they perceive more powerful — but she, both leading into office and
trusting and judging worthy of all honours, was seen to honour not those of the greatest assessments, but the most decent in their natures; holding that whoever conquers in the account of virtue conquers in all things. And she showed it not least when she was strongest. For when there were at the same times conspicuous men among her — some of them wealthy beyond the first of the Greek houses, others as poor as could be — for the championship of the Greeks she chose one of these latter; and accordingly he won repute by what he was set over, and the city by what it judged. And though there are many things one might say about the constitution, the most are both already taken up beforehand, and the occasion takes them away, and there is no necessity to say all; but adding one thing I will end the discourse about this too. For the fact that the best and that which falls according to license have here coincided, and that the manner of living is most common to all, while the honours are reserved for the most decent — how is this not the mark of a truly free city and constitution, in which it is possible to live as one wishes, but to be honoured and to have power belongs not to those who wish, but to those who have been tested? And accordingly, both in the contests of wars and in their needs, they preserved the fitting thing: they were not zealous about affairs from a half or even a smaller share, but all alike, with their eagerness, vied according to their power, as men contending for a common fatherland and common prizes, and not with risk set before some and lordship, if they prevailed, before others. From which concord and trust of one another flourished throughout the city; and if anywhere they fell into difference, they recognized one another without trouble; but if courage were needed anywhere, all else was folly compared with them — not even all-round athletes who conquer in everything seem to me to prevail so completely in all things. And in what occasions would one not be the better for remembering the city? In campaigns? And whence would one take fairer
examples? Or by what speeches, used, would one better exhort? But in the festivals? But she herself is the leader of these. But in the assemblies and the management of affairs in the city? And what people is itself keener and gentler, or what popular leaders more worthy to admire? But in the practice of speeches and of the rest of wisdom? But even now still all come together here; and the families of the philosophers have not died out, by the good fortune of the city — apart from the fact that those anywhere on earth must of necessity remember at once both speeches and the Athenians, and could never cast from their soul her image, looking into the speeches as into a mirror. And accordingly to all men the name and the soil of the city are so reverend as nothing else, one and the same; and neither private men nor kings honoured her by small things, but so that they themselves gloried in the excesses of the honours they displayed. And plain too is the goodwill and the vote from the very gods, both through the common seer and ancestral interpreter of the city — bidding men to sacrifice the pre-ploughing rite on behalf of the Greeks, and naming her the mother-city of the crops, and further thinking fit that she should wear the crown, as conquering through life. And an eagle in the clouds the god calls her, in comparison with the other townships. To her alone, it seems, of cities the two opposite things have befallen: for both most and fairest things have been said by men about her, and there is none who has obtained fewer. For before all others she has been admired, yet has heard nothing worthy of herself. Before, then, I admired, hearing, the prytaneion of wisdom and the hearth of Greece and the bulwark and all such things that were sung to the city; but now all these seem to me to fall short. But if one must call any city a viceroy of the gods, or kindred to them, or an image and boundary of human nature, this one, I think, would justly be so called.
In return for which, men of Greece, it is fitting neither to feel envy toward the city nor, giving way, to be ashamed, but to increase her from what we have and to share her ambition. For when the Athenians conquer, the conquering is with you. For that all should be best of all is impossible. But as, when a general excels, the city shares in the glory, so, when the leading city is honoured as is fitting, all have a part in the ambition. And I think it brings no shame even to the Athenians themselves, if one offers them their acropolis as ambassador. You too, then, ought, accounting the city as a kind of acropolis or summit of Greece and of your kindred, to adorn her both in deed and in word, and to think that you share in the glory, not that you are robbed of it. The discourse too has been wrought by us as an ornament for the spectacle of the Panathenaia in place of the peplos; and may it be given as a grace of the same goddess to whom both the discourse and the city belong.