Whether the Athenians Were More Renowned For Their Warlike Achievements or For Their Learning (6-8)

Would ye that we should introduce the men themselves carrying before them the marks and signals of their own actions, permitting them to enter in order, like the actors upon the stage? But then poets must go before them, with flutes and lyres, saying and singing:

Far from our choirs who in this lore’s unskilled,

Or does not cherish pure and holy thoughts,

Nor views nor joins the Muses’ generous rites,

Nor is perfected in the Bacchic tongue,

With which Cratinus bull-devourer sang.

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And then there must be scenes, and vizards, and altars, and versatile machines. There must be also the tragedy-actors, the Nicostrati, Callippidae. Menisci, Theodori, Poli, the dressers, and sedan-men of tragedy,—like those of some sumptuously apparelled lady, or rather like the painters, gilders, and colorers of statues,—together with a costly preparation of vessels, vizards, purple coats, and machines, attended by an unruly rabble of dancers and guards; and let all the preparation be exceeding costly and magnificent. A Lacedaemonian once, beholding all this, not improperly said: How strangely are the Athenians mistaken, consuming so much cost and labor upon ridiculous trifles; that is to say, wasting the expenses of navies and of victualling whole armies upon the stage. For if you compute the cost of those dramatic preparations, you will find that the Athenians spent more upon their Bacchae, Oedipuses, and Antigone, and the woes of Medea and Electra, than in their wars against the barbarians for liberty and extending their empire. For their general oft-times led forth the soldiers to battle, commanding them to make provisions only of such food as needed not the tedious preparation of fire. And indeed their admirals and captains of their ships went aboard without any other provision than meal, onions, and cheese. Whereas the masters of the choruses, feeding their dancers with eels, lettuce, the kernels of garlic, and marrow, feasted them for a long time, exercising their voices and pleasing their palates by turns. And as for these captains, if they were overcome, it was their misfortune to be contemned and hissed at; and if they were victors, there was neither tripod, nor consecrated ornament of victory, as Demetrius says, but a life prolonged among cables, and an empty house for a tomb. For this is the tribute of poetry, and there is nothing more splendid to be expected from it.

Now then let us consider the great generals as they approach, to whom, as they pass by, all those must rise up and pay their salutations who have never been famous for

any great action, military or civil, and were never furnished with daring boldness nor purity of wisdom for such enterprises, nor initiated by the hand of Miltiades that overthrew the Medes, or of Themistocles that vanquished the Persians. This is the martial gang, at once combating with phalanxes by land, and engaging with navies by sea, and laden with the spoils of both. Give ear, Alala, daughter of War, to this same prologue of swords and spears.

Hasten to death, when for your country vowed,

as Epaminondas said,—for your country, your sepulchres, and your altars, throwing yourselves into most noble and illustrious combats. Their victories methinks I see approaching toward me, not dragging after them a goat or ox for a reward, nor crowned with ivy and smelling of the dregs of wine. But whole cities, islands, continents, and colonies well peopled are their rewards, being surrounded with trophies and spoils of all sorts. Whose statues and symbols of honor are Parthenons, a hundred feet in length, South-walls, houses for ships, the Propylaea, the Chersonesus, and Amphipolis. Marathon displays the victory of Miltiades, and Salamis the glory of Themistocles, triumphing over the ruins of a thousand vessels. The victory of Cimon brings away a hundred Phoenician galleys from the Eurymedon. And the victory of Cleon and Demosthenes brings away the shield of Brasidas, and the captive soldiers in chains from Sphacteria. The victory of Conon and Thrasybulus walls the city, and brings the people back at liberty from Phylae. The victory of Alcibiades near Sicily restores the languishing condition of the city; and Greece beheld Ionia raised again by the victories of Neleus and Androclus in Lydia and Caria.

If you ask what benefit every one of the rest procured to the city; one will answer Lesbos, another Samos, another Cyprus, another the Pontus Euxinus, another five

hundred galleys with three banks of oars, and another ten thousand talents, the rewards of fame and trophies won. For these victories the city observes public anniversary festivals, for these victories she sacrifices to the Gods; not for the victories of Aeschylus and Sophocles, not because Carcinus was victorious[*] with his Aerope, or Astydamas with his Hector. But upon the sixth of September, even to this day, the Athenians celebrate a festival in memory of the fight at Marathon. Upon the sixteenth of the same month libations are poured in remembrance of the naval victory won by Chabrias near Naxos. Upon the twelfth they offer thanksgiving sacrifices for the recovery of their liberty. For upon that day they returned back from Phylae. The third of the same month they won the battle of Plataea. The sixteenth of April was consecrated to Diana, when the moon appeared in the full to the Greeks victorious at Salamis. The twelfth of June was made sacred by the battle of Mantinea, wherein the Athenians, when their confederates were routed and fled, alone by themselves obtained the victory and triumph over their victorious enemies. Such actions as these procured honor and veneration and grandeur to the city; for these acts it was that Pindar called Athens the support of Greece; not because she had set the fortune of the Greeks upright by the tragedies of Phrynichus and Thespis, but because (as he says) near Artemisium the Athenian youth laid the first glorious foundation of freedom; and afterwards fixing it upon the adamantine pillars of Salamis, Mycale, and Plataea, they multiplied their felicity to others.

But as for the writings of the poets, they are mere bubbles. But rhetoricians and orators indeed have some. thing in them that renders them in some measure fit to be compared with great captains. For which reason, Aeschines

in derision reports of Demosthenes, that he said he was bringing a suit in behalf of the orator’s stand against the generals’ office.[*]But for all that, do you think it proper to prefer the Plataic oration of Hyperides to the Plataic victory of Aristides? Or the oration of Lysias against the Thirty Tyrants, to the acts of Thrasybulus and Archias that put them to death? Or that of Aeschines against Timarchus for unchastity, to the relieving of Byzantium by Phocion, by which he prevented the sons of the confederates from being the scorn and derision of the Macedonians? Or shall we set before the public crowns which Demosthenes received for setting Greece at liberty, his oration on the Crown, wherein the rhetorician has behaved himself most splendidly and learnedly, swearing by their progenitors that ventured their lives at Marathon for the liberty of Greece,[*]rather than by those that instructed youth in the schools? And therefore the city buried these heroes at the expense of the public, honoring the sacred relics of their bodies, not men like Isocrates, Antiphon, and Isaeus, and the orator has translated them into the number of the Gods; and by these it was that he chose to swear, though he did not follow their example. Isocrates also was wont to say, that they who ventured their lives at Marathon fought as if they had been inspired with other souls than their own; and extolling their daring boldness and contempt of life, to one that asked him (being at that time very aged) how he did,—As well, said he, as one who, being now above fourscore and ten years old, esteems death to be the worst of evils. For neither did he spend his years to old age in whetting his sword, in grinding and sharpening his spear, in scouring and polishing his helmet, in commanding navies and armies, but in knitting and joining together antithetical and equally balanced clauses, and words of similar endings, all but smoothing and adapting his periods and sentences with files, planes, or chisels. How would that man have been affrighted at the clattering of weapons or the routing of a phalanx, who was so afraid of suffering one vowel to clash with another, or to pronounce a sentence where but one syllable was wanting!

Miltiades, the very next day after the battle of Marathon, returned a victor to the city with his army. And Pericles, having subdued the Samians in nine months, derided Agamemnon that was ten years taking of Troy. But Isocrates was nearly three Olympiads (or twelve years) in writing his Panegyric; in all which time he had neither been a general nor an ambassador, neither built a city nor been an admiral, notwithstanding the many wars that harassed Greece within that time. But while Timotheus freed Euboea from slavery, while Chabrias vanquished the enemy near Naxos, while Iphicrates defeated and cut to pieces a whole battalion of the Lacedaemonians near Lechaeum, while the Athenians, having shaken off the Spartan yoke, set the rest of Greece at liberty, with as ample privileges as they had themselves; he sits poring at home in his study, seeking out proper phrases and choice words for his oration, as long a time as Pericles spent in erecting the Propylaea and the Parthenon. Though the comic poet Cratinus seems to deride even Pericles himself as one that was none of the quickest, where he says of the middle wall:

In words the mighty Pericles

Has rais’d us up a wall;

But ’tis a wall in only words,

For we see none at all.

Consider now the poor spirit of this great orator, who spent the ninth part of his life in compiling one single oration. But to say no more of him, is it rational to compare the harangues of Demosthenes the orator with the martial exploits of Demosthenes the great leader? For example, the oration against Conon for an assault, with the trophies which the other erected before Pylos? Or the declamation against Amathusius concerning slaves, with the noble service which the other performed in bringing home the Spartan captives? Neither can it be said, that Demosthenes for his oration in regard to foreigners ⋯ deserved as much honor as Alcibiades, who joined the Mantineans and Eleans as confederates with the Athenians against the Lacedaemonians. And yet we must acknowledge that the public orations of Demosthenes deserve this praise, that in his Philippics he bravely encourages the Athenians to take arms, and he extols the enterprise of Leptines⋯.