| Plato, Laws (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Pl. Leg.]. | ||
| <<Pl. Leg. 697b | Pl. Leg. 699b (Greek) | >>Pl. Leg. 701b |
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.Megillus
What you say, Stranger, is perfectly true, and worthy of your country as well as of yourself.
AthenianThat 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? 700aMegillusWell said! Try, however, to make your meaning still more clear to us.
AthenianI will. Under the old laws, my friends, our commons had no control over anything, but were, so to say, voluntary slaves to the laws.
MegillusWhat laws do you mean?
AthenianThose dealing with the music of that age, in the first place,—to describe from its commencement how the life of excessive liberty grew up. Among us, at that time, music was divided into various classes and styles:
700bone class of song was that of prayers to the gods, which bore the name of “hymns”; contrasted with this was another class, best called “dirges”; “paeans” formed another; and yet another was the “dithyramb,” named, I fancy, after Dionysus. “Nomes” also were so called as being a distinct class of song; and these were further described as “citharoedic nomes.” note So these and other kinds being classified and fixed, it was forbidden to set one kind of words to a different class of tune. note 700cThe authority whose duty it was to know these regulations, and, when known, to apply them in its judgments and to penalize the disobedient, was not a pipe nor, as now, the mob's unmusical shoutings, nor yet the clappings which mark applause: in place of this, it was a rule made by those in control of education that they themselves should listen throughout in silence, while the children and their ushers and the general crowd were kept in order by the discipline of the rod.| Plato, Laws (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Pl. Leg.]. | ||
| <<Pl. Leg. 697b | Pl. Leg. 699b (Greek) | >>Pl. Leg. 701b |
