The Historians' History of the World 03

After half apologising for the tartness of these reproofs—which however, as the Spartans were now well disposed to go to war forthwith, would be well-timed and even agreeable—the Corinthian orator vindicates the necessity of plain-speaking by the urgent peril of the emergency and the formidable character of the enemy who threatened them. “You do not reflect” he says “how thoroughly different the Athenians are from yourselves. They are innovators by nature, sharp both in devising, and in executing what they have determined: you are sharp only in keeping what you have got, in determining on nothing beyond, and in doing even less than absolute necessity requires. They again dare beyond their means, run risks beyond their own judgment, and keep alive their hopes in desperate circumstances: your peculiarity is, that your performance comes short of your power, you have no faith even in what your judgment guarantees, when in difficulties you despair of all escape. They never hang back, you are habitual laggards: they love foreign service, you cannot stir from home: for they are always under the belief that their movements will lead to some further gain, while you fancy that new products will endanger what you already have. When successful, they make the greatest forward march; when defeated, they fall back the least. Moreover they task their bodies on behalf of their city as if they were the bodies of others, while their minds are most of all their own, for exertion in her service. When their plans for acquisition do not come successfully out, they feel like men robbed of what belongs to them: yet the acquisitions when realised appear like trifles compared with what remains to be acquired. If they sometimes fail in an attempt, new hopes arise in some other direction to supply the want; for with them alone the possession and the hope of what they aim at are almost simultaneous, from their habit of quickly executing all that they have once resolved. And in this manner do they toil throughout all their lives amidst hardship and peril, disregarding present enjoyment in the continual thirst for increase, knowing no other festival recreation except the performance of active duty, and deeming inactive repose a worse condition than fatiguing occupation. To speak the truth in two words, such is their inborn temper that they will neither remain at rest themselves nor allow rest to others.

“Such is the city which stands opposed to you, Lacedæmonians—yet ye still hang back from action. Your continual scruples and apathy would hardly be safe, even if ye had neighbours like yourselves in character: but as to dealings with Athens, your system is antiquated and out of date. In politics as in art, it is the modern improvements which are sure to come out victorious; and though unchanged institutions are best, if a city be not called upon to act, yet multiplicity of active obligations requires multiplicity and novelty of contrivance. It is through these numerous trials that the means of Athens have acquired so much more new development than yours.”

The Corinthians concluded by saying, that if, after so many previous warnings, now repeated for the last time, Sparta still refused to protect her allies against Athens, if she delayed to perform her promise made to the Potidæans of immediately invading Attica, they (the Corinthians) would forthwith look for safety in some new alliance, which they felt themselves fully justified in doing. They admonished her to look well to the case, and to carry forward Peloponnesus, with undiminished dignity, as it had been transmitted to her from her predecessors.

Such was the memorable picture of Athens and her citizens, as exhibited by her fiercest enemy before the public assembly at Sparta. It was calculated to impress the assembly, not by appeal to recent or particular misdeeds, but by the general system of unprincipled and endless aggression which was imputed to Athens during the past, and by the certainty held out that the same system, unless put down by measures of decisive hostility, would be pushed still farther in future, to the utter ruin of Peloponnesus. And to this point did the Athenian envoy (staying in Sparta about some other negotiation and now present in the assembly) address himself in reply, after having asked and obtained permission from the magistrates. The empire of Athens was now of such standing that the younger men present had no personal knowledge of the circumstances under which it had grown up, and what was needed as information for them would be impressive as a reminder even to their seniors.