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And here I feel constrained to deliver an opinion, which most men,
I know, will mis-like, but which, as it seems to me to be true, I
am determined not to withhold. Had the Athenians, from fear of the
approaching danger, quitted their country, or had they without
quitting it submitted to the power of Xerxes, there would certainly
have been no attempt to resist the Persians by sea; in which case the
course of events by land would have been the following. Though the
Peloponnesians might have carried ever so many breastworks across the
Isthmus, yet their allies would have fallen off from the
Lacedaemonians, not by voluntary desertion, but because town after
town must have been taken by the fleet of the barbarians; and so the
Lacedaemonians would at last have stood alone, and, standing alone,
would have displayed prodigies of valour and died nobly. Either they
would have done thus, or else, before it came to that extremity,
seeing one Greek state after another embrace the cause of the Medes,
they would have come to terms with King Xerxes - and thus, either
way Greece would have been brought under Persia. For I cannot
understand of what possible use the walls across the Isthmus could have
been, if the king had had the mastery of the sea. If then a man
should now say that the Athenians were the saviours of Greece, he
would not exceed the truth. For they truly held the scales; and
whichever side they espoused must have carried the day. They too it
was who, when they had determined to maintain the freedom of Greece,
roused up that portion of the Greek nation which had not gone over to
the Medes; and so, next to the gods, they repulsed the invader.
Even the terrible oracles which reached them from Delphi, and struck
fear into their hearts, failed to persuade them to fly from Greece.
They had the courage to remain faithful to their land, and await the
coming of the foe.
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