Hellenica (1.7.26-1.7.30)

What is it, pray, that you fear, that you are in such[*] excessive haste? Do you fear lest you will lose the right to put to death and set free anyone you please if you proceed in accordance with the law, but think that you will retain this right if you proceed in violation of the law, by the method which Callixeinus persuaded the Senate to report to the people, that is, by a single vote?

Yes, but you might possibly be putting to death some one who is really innocent; and repentance afterwards—ah, remember how painful and unavailing it always is, and especially when one’s error has brought about a man’s death.

You would do a monstrous thing if, after granting in the past to Aristarchus,[*] the destroyer of the democracy and afterwards the betrayer of Oenoe to your enemies the Thebans, a day in which to defend himself as he pleased, and allowing him all his other rights under the law,—if, I say, you shall now deprive the generals, who have done everything to your satisfaction, and have defeated the enemy, of these same rights.

Let no such act be yours, men of Athens, but guard the laws, which are your own and above all else have made you supremely great, and do not try to do anything without their sanction. And now come back to the actual circumstances under which the mistakes are thought to have been committed by the generals. When, after winning the battle, they sailed in to the shore, Diomedon urged that they should one and all put out to sea in line and pick up the wreckage and the shipwrecked men, while Erasinides proposed that all should sail with the utmost speed against the enemy at Mytilene. But Thrasyllus said that both things[*] would be accomplished if they should leave some of the ships there and should sail with the rest against the enemy;

and if this plan were decided upon, he advised that each of the generals, who were eight in number, should leave behind three ships from his own division, and that they should also leave the ten ships of the taxiarchs, the ten of the Samians, and the three of the nauarchs. These amount all told to forty-seven ships, four for each one of the lost vessels, which were twelve in number.