Belgian essays (French) -- Translations into English; Death
their fortune, escaped not from their fear but from their glory.
“So died these men as became Athenians. You, their survivors,
must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the
field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue.
And, not contented with ideas derived only from words of
the advantages which are bound up with the defence of your
country, though these would furnish a valuable text to a
speaker even before an audience so alive to them as the
present, you must yourselves realize the power of Athens and
feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills
your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon
you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty and
a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win
all this and that no personal failure in an enterprise could
make them consent to deprive their country of their valour,
but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution
that they could offer. For by this offering of their lives made
in common by them all they each of them individually received
that renown which never grows old and, for a sepulchre, not
so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but
that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be
eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story
shall call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole
earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where
the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in
every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it,
except that of the heart. These take as your model and, judging
happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valour,
never decline the dangers of war. For it is not the miserable
that would most justly be unsparing of their lives: these
have nothing to hope for; it is rather they to whom continued
life may bring reverses as yet unknown and to whom a fall, if
it came, would be most tremendous in its consequences. And
surely, to a man of spirit, the degradation of cowardice must
be immeasurably more grievous than the unfelt death which
strikes him in the midst of his strength and patriotism!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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