And yet they were involved in more and greater disasters in the time of the empireSo also Thuc. 1.23. than have ever befallen Athens in all the rest of her history. Two hundred ships which set sail for Egypt perished with their crews,These were sent to aid Inarus of Egypt in his revolt against Persia, 460 B.C. See Thuc. 1.104 ff. and a hundred and fifty off the island of Cyprus;Thucydides (Thuc. 1.112) speaks of a fleet of 200 ships of which 60 were sent to Egypt, the remainder under Cimon laying siege to Citium in Cyprus. This expedition, though expensive in the loss of men and money, was not disastrous like the former. in the Decelean WarThe text is very uncertain. The reading of the London papyrus is at least preferable since the loss of 10,000 hoplites (unless a hopeless exaggeration) cannot be accounted for if the reading of ΓΕ or that of the other MSS. is adopted. See Laistner in xv. p. 81. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (according to Thuc. 2.13), the Athenian heavy-armed troops numbered but 29,000. Later (according to Dem. 25.51), the whole body of Athenian citizens numbered but 20,000. 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,Diodorus (Dio. Sic. 13.21) gives the same number of men, but 200 ships. Thucydides gives the number of ships as 209 and the number of men as not less than 40,000, including heavy and light armed troops, crews, etc. See especially Thuc. 7.75.5. and, finally, in the Hellespont two hundred ships.At the battle of Aegospotami in 405 B.C., the denouement of this tragic history. Xenophon (Xen. Hell. 2.1.20) and Diodorus (Dio. Sic. 13.105) give 180 as the number of 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 funeralsSee Isoc. 4.74, note. 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-groundsThe Ceramicus. with the bodies of their fellow citizens and the registers of the phratries and of the stateCf. Isoc. 8.50. All citizens were duly enrolled in the phratry registers, φρατορικὰ γραμματεῖα and in the state registers, kept in each township, ληξιαρχικὰ γραμματεῖα. 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 tyrantsPisitratus and his sons, Hippias and Hipparchus. See Aristot. Ath. Pol. 18. and the Persian Wars as well, have been, you will find, entirely wiped outCf. Isoc. 8.4. 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 siegeThey were virtually in a state of seige after the occupation of Decelea by the Spartans, who cut off their food supplies. and extreme misfortuneThe terrible plague described by Thucydides (i. 23; ii. 48 ff.).; 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.