Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and RomansPlutarch
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
Plutarch
Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
But in other things he did not comply with the giddy impulses of the
citizens, nor quit his own resolutions to follow their fancies, when,
carried away with the thought of their strength and great success, they
were eager to interfere again in Egypt, and to disturb the king of
Persia's maritime dominions. Nay, there were a good many who were, even
then, possessed with that unblessed and inauspicious passion for Sicily,
which afterward the orators of Alcibiades's party blew up into a flame.
There were some also who dreamt of Tuscany and of Carthage, and not
without plausible reason in their present large dominion and the
prosperous course of their affairs.
But Pericles curbed this passion for foreign conquest, and unsparingly
pruned and cut down their ever busy fancies for a multitude of
undertakings; and directed their power for the most part to securing and
consolidating what they had already got, supposing it would be quite
enough for them to do, if they could keep the Lacedaemonians in check;
to whom he entertained all along a sense of opposition; which, as upon
many other occasions, so he particularly showed by what he did in the
time of the holy war. The Lacedaemonians, having gone with an army to
Delphi, restored Apollo's temple, which the Phocians had got into their
possession, to the Delphians; immediately after their departure,
Pericles, with another army, came and restored the Phocians. And the
Lacedaemonians having engraven the record of their privilege of
consulting the oracle before others, which the Delphians gave them, upon
the forehead of the brazen wolf which stands there, he, also, having
received from the Phocians the like privilege for the Athenians, had it
cut upon the same wolf of brass on his right side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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