Now your ancestors, whom their orators, unlike ours today, did not caress or flatter, for five and forty yearsThe interval between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. commanded the willing obedience of the Greeks; more than ten thousand talents did they accumulate in our Acropolis; the then king of MacedoniaPerdiccas II.; a pardonable exaggeration. was their subject, even as a barbarian ought to be subject to Greeks; many honorable trophies for victory on sea and land did they erect, themselves serving in the field; and they alone of mankind left behind them by their deeds a renown greater than all detraction.