Laws

Ath. To begin with, there was a god watching over you; and he, foreseeing the future, restricted within due bounds the royal power by making your kingly line no longer single but twofold. In the next place, some man, in whom human nature was blended with power divine, observing your government to be still swollen with fever, blended the self-willed force of the royal strain with the temperate potency of age, by making the power of the eight-and-twenty elders of equal weight with that of the kings in the greatest matters. Then your third saviour, seeing your government still fretting and fuming, curbed it, as one may say, by the power of the ephors, which was not far removed from government by lot. Thus, in your case, according to this account, owing to its being blended of the right elements and possessed of due measure, the kingship not only survived itself but ensured the survival of all else. For if the matter had lain with Temenus and Cresphontes and the lawgivers of their day—whosoever those lawgivers really were,—even the portion of Aristodemus could never have survived, for they were not fully expert in the art of legislation; otherwise they could hardly have deemed it sufficient to moderate by means of sworn pledges a youthful soul endowed with power such as might develop into a tyranny; but now God has shown of what kind the government ought to have been then, and ought to be now, if it is to endure. That we should understand this, after the occurrence, is—as I said before—no great mark of sagacity, since it is by no means difficult to draw an inference from an example in the past; but if, at the time, there had been anyone who foresaw the result and was able to moderate the ruling powers and unify them,—such a man would have preserved all the grand designs then formed, and no Persian or other armament would ever have set out against Greece, or held us in contempt as a people of small account.

Clin. True.

Ath. The way they repulsed the Persians, Clinias, was disgraceful. But when I say disgraceful, I do not imply that they did not win fine victories both by land and sea in those victorious campaigns: what I call disgraceful is this,—that, in the first place, one only of those three States defended Greece, while the other two were so basely corrupt that one of them actually prevented Lacedaemon from assisting Greece by warring against her with all its might, and Argos, the other,—which stood first of the three in the days of the Dorian settlement— when summoned to help against the barbarian, paid no heed and gave no help. Many are the discreditable charges one would have to bring against Greece in relating the events of that war;