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
In the ninth month, the Samians surrendering themselves and delivering
up the town, Pericles pulled down their walls, and seized their
shipping, and set a fine of a large sum of money upon them, part of
which they paid down at once, and they agreed to bring in the rest by a
certain time, and gave hostages for security. Duris the Samian makes a
tragical drama out of these events, charging the Athenians and Pericles
with a great deal of cruelty, which neither Thucydides, nor Ephorus, nor
Aristotle have given any relation of, and probably with little regard to
truth; how, for example, he brought the captains and soldiers of the
galleys into the market-place at Miletus, and there having bound them
fast to boards for ten days, then, when they were already all but half
dead, gave order to have them killed by beating out their brains with
clubs, and their dead bodies to be flung out into the open streets and
fields, unburied. Duris, however, who even where he has no private
feeling concerned, is not wont to keep his narrative within the limits
of truth, is the more likely upon this occasion to have exaggerated the
calamities which befell his country, to create odium against the
Athenians. Pericles, however, after the reduction of Samos, returning
back to Athens, took care that those who died in the war should be
honorably buried, and made a funeral harangue, as the custom is, in
their commendation at their graves, for which he gained great
admiration. As he came down from the stage on which he spoke, the rest
of the women came and complimented him, taking him by the hand, and
crownings him with garlands and ribbons, like a victorious athlete in
the games; but Elpinice, coming near to him, said, "These are brave
deeds, Pericles, that you have done, and such as deserve our chaplets;
who have lost us many a worthy citizen, not in a war with Phoenicians or
Medes, like my brother Cimon, but for the overthrow of an allied and
kindred city." As Elpinice spoke these words, he, smiling quietly, as
it is said, returned her answer with this verse, --
Old women should not seek to be perfumed.
Ion says of him, that, upon this exploit of his, conquering the Samians,
he indulged very high and proud thoughts of himself: whereas Agamemnon
was ten years taking a barbarous city, he had in nine months' time
vanquished and taken the greatest and most powerful of the Ionians. And
indeed it was not without reason that he assumed this glory to himself,
for, in real truth, there was much uncertainty and great hazard in this
war, if so be, as Thucydides tells us, the Samian state were within a
very little of wresting the whole power and dominion of the sea out of
the Athenians' hands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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