Orationes 32
Orationes 32 Imperial Aelius Aristides Greek- The day which we have all long yearned to see, men of Lacedaemon, has now come, the day that grants us to deliberate concerning the Athenians whatever we may wish. But we must suffer nothing ignoble, nor, if it must be said, hold in dishonour what has been accomplished; rather we must recognize how great a thing has been achieved, and that the Athenians lack no measure of disaster, nor have we any room left for anger. I would beg you not to suppose that I speak out of friendship for these men, had I not many tokens, all of which you know as well as I do, both of my goodwill toward you and of my hatred toward them. 400. None the less, the same counsel which I think I ought to give myself I think I ought to give you also: not to look first at what they must suffer before we look at what is honourable for us to do, and not to fail to recognize that we are deliberating no more about the city of the Athenians than about our own. For if we set upon what has been done some fitting resolve, we shall have taken counsel for ourselves and shall in truth have conquered; but if you are led on to do what certain men urge, I fear it may prove fitting to call the outcome itself a thing beyond all reckoning. For if anyone were to ask us why we took up this long and great war, we could not say that they drove off our flocks as plunder, nor that they cut off our territory, as the Argives did, nor anything else of that sort; nor again that it was out of envy of their power and prosperity—indeed this last of all we would never concede. For what cause, then, was it? For the freedom of the Greeks, we would say; and yet I think that we ourselves ought not even to have to say this, but that all men would say it on our behalf. And indeed that we never had against them any advantage greater than this no one could deny. For it fell to them to be hated for their meddling, but to us to be loved for what we proclaimed. For what reason, then, men of Lacedaemon, have I called these things to mind? For one reason, that you may know that nothing remains for us to do, but that the war has reached its proper end. For just as from the beginning, when men were free, there was nothing more to seek, so now that aim has been fulfilled. And if we act thus, we shall make our deeds accord with our words and shall win the fairest victory of all, one profitable to the Greeks and honourable to ourselves; but if we destroy the city utterly, we shall be thought to have made war not out of foresight that the Greeks should become free, but out of envy of the city, glutting our own baseness rather than being aggrieved at their excess. And this, surely, is plain to everyone, that it tells against us. 401. Consider besides this another thing, even if it will seem to some a paradox: that the very crimes of the Athenians save them, and compel us to act with humanity. How so? Because if we then thought it right to be indignant with the Athenians whenever they brought any of the Greeks under their power, then surely now it is not permitted to us to destroy these men themselves. For to deprive of freedom and to destroy utterly are by no means the same thing; and where the lesser course was unfitting for them, the greater is not open to you. Nor again is it possible to say this: that all the rest had to be made independent, and that we had to run risks for this, but that the case of the Athenians was to be reckoned as nothing, so that we should destroy them root and branch when it was in our power to save them, if only you cast your votes for it. For where, if you had thought it right that they alone of all should be slaves, that would not have befitted you, surely the destroying of them is not even close. And as for the crimes they committed against the Scionaeans and the Melians, how is it not absurd to accuse them and to say that these were crimes, and yet to think it right to imitate them as if they were rightly done, and not to reason out and see that the Athenians, when they did these things, had perhaps some plea to make—for they could say that they were being insolently treated by lesser men, and that they were unjustly hated, and that they failed to persuade though they made overtures, and other such things, not speaking what is strong nor sufficient, I grant it myself, yet still they have it in them to be shameless—but to us there is left no plea at all for not appearing, once we have done these very things, to have done what we ourselves have condemned and what we have laid down ought not to happen among the Greeks. For what dreadful deed will those men any longer be thought to have done, with you for judges, if it shall seem to you no dreadful thing that Athens has perished? But I think, men of Lacedaemon, that if anyone were to bid you imitate the battle of Marathon or the sea-fight at Salamis won by the Athenians, it would not be right to refuse, but such transgressions as these it would be least of all right to imitate. And if it does not befit us even to take from others the fairest of deeds, but rather to be ourselves an example to the rest, surely it is not for us to make ourselves the patrons of the very worst of the things done by those men, men utterly puffed up with arrogance. 402. For it seems to me that an excess of horror attaches to the deed on both counts. For those who would do it are Lacedaemonians and not Athenians, and those who would suffer it are Athenians and not Scionaeans, whose very name is not even known to many. And then, too, these men, it seems to me, even had they mastered us, would have sought nothing further, but would have been ashamed and, out of regard for their dignity and their virtues, would have halted somewhere about that point. And we know that even over the men from Pylos they were in a manner ashamed. Do not, then, consider for what wrongs you will take vengeance on them, but who they are, and who you yourselves are, and what the measure of the vengeance is. It is open now to the Aeginetans to recover their own; but if we destroy the Athenians themselves and raze their city, then not even if we ourselves should wish to change our minds is anything whatever left to us. And I should have thought it least of all permissible for those who blame the Athenians to propose these measures. For if what was done was done by them justly, why do they blame it? And if they acted without measure, how is it honourable for you to go so far in want of feeling? For I think that, if you spare them, you will confirm the accusations by the very deed and will show what manner of men they ought to have been toward the Greeks; but if you destroy them, you will make the fairest defence on their behalf. For just as in the games it is the victors who carry off the name, so you, if you surpass their recklessness, will yourselves inherit the infamy. Thus, by pressing on with the prosecution you absolve them of the charges, and by pardoning them you convict them. And indeed this too must not escape you: that now, in their anger at what they charge, the Greeks would gladly see them suffer anything whatever; but when time has come between and they have taken the matter to reckoning, they will grieve with the Athenians and will blame you. Great are the reversals of affairs; these things one ought to foresee, and to suppose that those who cast in the Athenians' teeth the sufferings of the Melians or the Scionaeans will cast in your teeth the sufferings of the Plataeans. But the things that belonged to the continuous war do not earn equal pardon when done at the very end, when it is possible to have ceased; nor is it honourable that such things should happen as often as may be, but rather that from the beginning none of them should come to pass. 403. For what Greek will be left, if, because of those who perished earlier, those who come after them are always to suffer this same thing? You see, too, that in the crowned contests we neither praise those who fight outside the lawful manner, nor, if anyone be charged with it, do we allow these same men to use such methods, but only such as abide by the established rules to prevail in that way. And indeed that the contests of the Greeks among themselves are not far from those I have spoken of, but would reasonably be only for victory, while destruction would be owed to natural enemies, to the barbarians—anyone who knows how to be a Greek not only in his words but also in his judgment would agree. And I think that, even if we judge these men the most hateful and most hostile of all, what we have done to them is not so slight as to need still some further penalty—if one must speak about Lacedaemonians and to Lacedaemonians. For so long as I saw more than three hundred triremes in the Piraeus, and tribute coming in each year to such and such an amount, and their greed reaching as far as the Maeotic lake, and men enslaved partly by force, partly by their counsels, and the Athenians reckoning the realm of Poseidon their own and sailing round the Peloponnese, and looking about them at the affairs of Sicily and Carthage and everywhere, and able to halt nowhere but making everything their own—then I thought there was occasion for both these feelings, both hatred and fear, and that we must bring their arrogance to its senses and set affairs back in their ancient state. But now, what occasion is there either for fear or for envy? Or with an eye to what shall we be contentious? Have we not destroyed more than so many myriads of their men in Sicily, abusing them in every fashion, and left them neither horse nor missile nor ship nor any kind of calamity untried? Here are two hundred other triremes seized; these three thousand here have perished after the manner of temple-robbers; and the rest fall day by day to the plague; and all of them are shut in as in a net; 404. and those many splendid things have flown away and vanished from them like a dream. And then are we to be angry at these men? By no means. For it belongs to men of your nature to restrain by arms those who stand against you, but to handle gently those who have fallen, and to hold that it is no less a point of honour to use well what one has than to conquer those who fight; especially since, even if at the present time they have become the basest of all toward the Greeks, there was a time when none were better than they—after us. But if you examine the matter rightly, the present charges against them will nowhere appear to match their valour of that day, I mean both in greatness and in number. For now they have unpeopled Scione and Melos and Torone and two or three other cities; but then they joined in saving all the cities of Greece, contending on their own against Datis, and in common with us against Xerxes and his lieutenants. And now they have driven out the Aeginetans; but then they abandoned their own land that nothing irremediable should befall the Greeks, and though it was open to them to sail away and be gone, or even to attach themselves to the King against us, they did not dare to do it. Are these the men whom this proposal asks you to give up? And I pass over in silence the ancient gift of corn, and the mysteries still celebrated each year, and the welcome given to those who flee for refuge, and ten thousand other acts of kindness. And such men are these toward the common cause of Greece—men now grown the objects of envy and hard to bear—but toward you in particular, what have they been? How they received the Heraclidae in this city, and how they initiated Heracles and the Dioscuri, first of foreigners, into the mysteries, I forbear to tell; and yet, even apart from any benefit, if they had supplicated you in the name of these gods, there would be reason to feel shame. But in the war against the Messenians, when we asked their help, who were they that sent Tyrtaeus? Or who that sent Cimon at the time of the earthquake, leading four thousand hoplites? Are their services to you, then, of such a kind, while ours toward them are smaller—we who, when the Dorians once marched against them, alone of all refused to take part, and who alone of all came to their aid when they were oppressed by tyrants? And to Marathon 405. we hastened so eagerly that we made ourselves the equals of day-runners. Is it honourable, then, that those who joined with us in saving our founding heroes should now, together with their children and their wives, be destroyed by us; or that those who abandoned their city for the freedom of the Greeks should be deprived of their city by us; or that those who fought against the tyrants on behalf of those men's freedom—and this before the virtues I have mentioned had been displayed—that these very men should now be destroyed by us in utter ruin? And that those who then took the Persian side should obtain pardon from you—they whom you had earlier voted to tithe, and the Athenians were not least among those who joined in persuading to this—while those who stood with you, and with whom it was fitting to be ranged in the common sanctuaries of the Greeks as liberators of Greece, should have their fortune end here? And that those who came from the barbarians for the clod and the water, as if to plunder the things of Athena, should so be put to death by those men; and that these two cities alone should adorn the Greek race—as many as they voted—ours and theirs; while, when their acropolis and temples are being razed and the city is utterly destroyed and their land is being given over to I know not what men—do you suppose that none of this concerns either the other gods or Athena, who is the common founder of both cities and bears the name of theirs? By no means, men of Lacedaemon: let us not imitate the barbarians, nor overturn the city which we have known as the bulwark of Greece, nor drag it down, nor cut out one of the two eyes of Greece; but, remembering that day on which they hearkened to us when we begged them not to abandon the Greeks—passing over the King's promises and despising dangers and terrors—repay them now in due season their gratitude, holding it one of the most shameful of things: in a private man, if his valour outweighed the charges against him, to know how to grant pardon; but in a city so great, that this justice should not be observed. Come, in the name of Zeus—for nothing is past swearing off—if the barbarian should once more lay hands upon us from the beginning—406. and anything may happen in the long course of time, and we know how Greece has been weakened—whom, tell me, shall we set beside us? To whom shall we send first? With whom will our summons to arms have more occasion? If you take my advice, you will spare the Athenians indeed, but you will spare yourselves first and all Greece besides; and you would reasonably turn aside those who are indignant, reminding them, city by city, that we shrank from no danger or hardship for their sake, and that they have what they desired: the Corinthians, Potidaea and the colonies; the Aeginetans, the recovery of their own; the Megarians, the use of the markets and harbours of the Athenians. And indeed for the Thebans, too, what was conceded at the outset concerning the Plataeans is gratitude enough; and it is not likely that they should force these matters, but much rather yield to you, and grant you this favour—if not ever for the Athenians' sake, yet for yours—not to sin for their own sake, nor to become accursed before the goddess and the Greeks. For this is a far greater pollution than those for which you yourselves once drove men into exile. And, having said the chief point, I shall have done. If you yourselves, had the Athenians prevailed, would have met with like treatment in every respect, then it is honourable to act as I say; but if not, let us conquer them on both counts, both by arms and by humanity.