On the Peace (86-90)

And yet they were involved in more and greater disasters in the time of the empire[*] than have ever befallen Athens in all the rest of her history. Two hundred ships which set sail for Egypt perished with their crews,[*] and a hundred and fifty off the island of Cyprus;[*] in the Decelean War[*] they lost ten thousand heavy armed troops of their own and of their allies, and in Sicily forty thousand men and two hundred and forty ships,[*] and, finally, in the Hellespont two hundred ships.[*]

But of the ships which were lost in fleets of ten or five or more and of the men who were slain in armies of a thousand or two thousand who could tell the tale? In a word, it was at that time a matter of regular routine to hold public funerals[*] every year, which many both of our neighbors and of the other Hellenes used to attend, not to grieve with us for the dead, but to rejoice together at our misfortunes.

And at last, before they knew it, they had filled the public burial-grounds[*] with the bodies of their fellow citizens and the registers of the phratries and of the state[*] with the names of those who had no claim upon the city. And you may judge of the multitude of the slain from this fact: The families of the most illustrious Athenians and our greatest houses, which survived the civil conflicts under the tyrants[*] and the Persian Wars as well, have been, you will find, entirely wiped out[*] under this empire upon which we set our hearts.

So that if one desired to go into the question of what befell the rest of our citizens, judging by this instance, it would be seen that we have been changed, one might almost say, into a new people. And yet we must not count that state happy which without discrimination recruits from all parts of the world a large number of citizens but rather that state which more than all others preserves the stock of those who in the beginning founded it. And we ought not to emulate those who hold despotic power nor those who have gained a dominion which is greater than is just but rather those who, while worthy of the highest honors, are yet content with the honors which are tendered them by a free people.

For no man nor any state could obtain a position more excellent than this or more secure or of greater worth. And it was because they acquired just this position that our ancestors in the time of the Persian Wars did not live in the manner of freebooters, now having more than enough for their needs, again reduced to a state of famine and siege[*] and extreme misfortune[*]; on the contrary, while they lived neither in want nor in surfeit of the means of subsistence day by day, they prided themselves on the justice of their polity and on their own virtues, and passed their lives more pleasantly than the rest of the world.