Menexenus (246)

Soc.

Yet truly in this war also we suffered the loss of valiant men,—the men who had difficult ground to cope with at Corinth and treachery at Lechaeum [*];

valiant, too, were the men who rescued the King and drove the Lacedaemonians off the seas. These men I recall to your memory, and you it becomes to join in praising and celebrating men such as these. And now we have related many of the noble deeds done by the men who are lying here, and by all the others who have died in defence of their city; yet far more numerous and more noble are those that remain unmentioned; for many days and nights would not suffice were one to relate them all in full. Wherefore it is right that every man, bearing these men in mind, should exhort these men’s children, just as in time of war, not to fall out of rank with their fathers nor to give way to cowardice and beat a retreat. And I myself for my own part, o ye children of valiant men, am now exhorting you and in the future, wheresoever I shall encounter any of you, I shall continue to remind you and admonish you to be zealous to show yourselves supremely valiant. But on this occasion it is my duty to record the message which your fathers, at the time when they were about to risk their lives, enjoined us, in case any ill befell them, to give to those who survived them. I will repeat to you both the words which I heard from their lips and those which they would now desire to say to you, if they had the power, judging from what they actually said on that occasion. You must, however, imagine that you are hearing from their own lips the message which I shall deliver. This, then, is what they said: O children, that ye are born of valiant sires is clearly shown by the facts now before you: we, who might have ignobly lived choose rather to die nobly, before we bring you and those after you to disgrace, and before we bring shame upon our own fathers and all our earlier forebears, since we deem that life is unworthy to be lived for the man who brings shame upon his own, and that such an one has no friend amongst gods or man, either here on earth, or under the earth when he is dead. Wherefore ye must bear in mind our words, and whatsoever else ye practice ye must practice it in union with valor, being well assured that when divorced from this all possessions and pursuits are base and ignoble. For neither does wealth bring honor to its possessor if combined with cowardice—for such an one is rich for another rather than for himself,—nor do beauty and strength appear comely, but rather uncomely, when they are attached to one that is cowardly and base, since they make their possessor more conspicuous and show up his cowardice;