Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and RomansPlutarch
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Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
Plutarch
Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
He has left nothing in writing behind him, except some decrees; and
there are but very few of his sayings recorded; one, for example, is,
that he said Aegina must, like a gathering in a man's eye, be removed
from Piraeus; and another, that he said he saw already war moving on its
way towards them out of Peloponnesus. Again, when on a time Sophocles,
who was his fellow-commissioner in the generalship, was going on board
with him, and praised the beauty of a youth they met with in the way to
the ship, "Sophocles," said he, "a general ought not only to have clean
hands, but also clean eyes." And Stesimbrotus tells us, that, in his
encomium on those who fell in battle at Samos, he said they were become
immortal, as the gods were. "For," said he, "we do not see them
themselves, but only by the honors we pay them, and by the benefits they
do us, attribute to them immortality; and the like attributes belong
also to those that die in the service of their country."
Since Thucydides describes the rule of Pericles as an aristocratical
government, that went by the name of a democracy, but was, indeed, the
supremacy of a single great man, while many others say, on the contrary,
that by him the common people were first encouraged and led on to such
evils as appropriations of subject territory; allowances for attending
theaters, payments for performing public duties, and by these bad habits
were, under the influence of his public measures, changed from a sober,
thrifty people, that maintained themselves by their own labors, to
lovers of expense, intemperance, and license, let us examine the cause
of this change by the actual matters of fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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