Greek Texts & Translations

Very true.

So let this be the conclusion of our account of the Persian empire, and how its present evil administration is due to excess of slavery and of despotism.

By all means.

We ought to examine next, in like manner, the Attic polity, and show how complete liberty, unfettered by any authority, is vastly inferior to a moderate form of government under elected magistrates. 698bAt the time when the Persians made their onslaught upon the Greeks—and indeed one might say on nearly all the nations of Europe—we Athenians had an ancient constitution, ^note and magistrates based on a fourfold grading; and we had Reverence, which acted as a kind of queen, causing us to live as the willing slaves of the existing laws. Moreover, the vastness of the Persian armament that threatened us both by sea and land, by the desperate fear it inspired, bound us still more closely in the bonds of slavery 698cto our rulers and our laws; and because of all this, our mutual friendliness and patriotism was greatly intensified. It was just about ten years before the seafight at Salamis that the Persian force arrived under Datis, whom Darius had despatched expressly against the Athenians and Eretrians, with orders to bring them back in chains, and with the warning that death would be the penalty of failure. So within a very short time 698dDatis, with his many myriads, captured by force the whole of the Eretrians; and to Athens he sent on an alarming account of how not a man of the Eretrians had escaped him: the soldiers of Datis had joined hands and swept the whole of Eretria clean as with a draw-net. This account—whether true, or whatever its origin—struck terror into the Greeks generally, and especially the Athenians; but when they sent out embassies in every direction to seek aid, all refused, 698eexcept the Lacedaemonians; and they were hindered by the war they were then waging against Messene, and possibly by other obstacles, about which we have no information, with the result that they arrived too late by one single day for the battle which took place at Marathon. After this, endless threats and stories of huge preparations kept arriving from the Persian king. Then, as time went on, news came that Darius was dead, and that his son, who had succeeded to the throne, was a young hothead, and still keen on the projected expedition. 699aThe Athenians imagined that all these preparations were aimed against them because of the affair at Marathon; and when they heard of how the canal had been made through Athos, and the bridge thrown over the Hellespont, and were told of the vast number of vessels in the Persian flotilla, then they felt that there was no salvation for them by land, nor yet by sea. By land they had no hopes that anyone would come to their aid; for they remembered how, on the first arrival of the Persians and their subjugation of Eretria, nobody helped them or 699bventured to join in the fight with them; and so they expected that the same thing would happen again on this occasion. By sea, too, they saw no hope of safety, with more than a thousand war-ships bearing down against them. One solitary hope of safety did they perceive—a slight one, it is true, and a desperate, yet the only hope—and it they derived from the events of the past, when victory in battle appeared to spring out of a desperate situation; and buoyed up by this hope, they discovered that they must rely for refuge on themselves only and on the gods. 699cSo all this created in them a state of friendliness one towards another—both the fear which then possessed them, and that begotten of the past, which they had acquired by their subjection to the former laws—the fear to which, in our previous discussions, ^note we have often given the name of “reverence,” saying that a man must be subject to this if he is to be good (though the coward is unfettered and unaffrighted by it). Unless this fear had then seized upon our people, they would never have united in self-defence, nor would they have defended their temples and tombs and fatherland, and their relatives and friends as well, 699din the way in which they then came to the rescue; but we would all have been broken up at that time and dispersed one by one in all directions.

What you say, Stranger, is perfectly true, and worthy of your country as well as of yourself.

That is so, Megillus: it is proper to mention the events of that period to you, since you share in the native character of your ancestors. But both you and Clinias must now consider whether what we are saying is 699eat all pertinent to our law-making; for my narrative is not related for its own sake, but for the sake of the law-making I speak of. Just reflect: seeing that we Athenians suffered practically the same fate as the Persians—they through reducing their people to the extreme of slavery, we, on the contrary, by urging on our populace to the extreme of liberty—what are we to say was the sequel, if our earlier statements have been at all nearly correct?