Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
That was rightly said by him to the generals who came after him, to whom he gave the opportunity for their later achievements once he had driven out the barbarian and freed Greece; and it will be rightly said also against those who pride themselves greatly on their speeches. For if you take away the men of action, will you have the men who write about them? Take away Pericles's statesmanship, and Phormio's naval trophies off Rhium,
and the brave deeds of Nicias around Cythera, Megara, and Corinth, and Demosthenes's Pylos, and Cleon's four hundred captives, and Tolmides sailing around the Peloponnese, and Myronides defeating the Boeotians at Oenophyta — and Thucydides has been erased for you too. Take away Alcibiades's youthful exploits around the Hellespont, and Thrasyllus's actions at Lesbos, and the overthrow of the oligarchy by Theramenes, and Thrasybulus and
Archinus and the seventy men from Phyle who rose up against Spartan domination, and Conon who again launched Athens onto the sea — and Cratippus too has been erased. As for Xenophon, he became his own historian, writing what campaigns he led and what successes he won, and he ascribed the composition of these events to Themistogenes of Syracuse, so that he might seem more trustworthy by narrating himself as though he were someone else, granting to another the glory of his own words.
But all the other historians — the Cleinodemi, the Diyli, Philochorus, Phylarchus — have become actors performing works that belong to others, arranging the deeds of generals and kings and slipping into their memory, so that they might share, as it were, in some ray of their light. For the reflection bends back from those who act to those who write, and there flashes up an image of a glory not their own, the deed shining through their words as though in
a mirror. This city has been the mother and kindly nurse of many other arts as well, having been the first to discover and reveal some of them, and having added power, honor, and growth to others. Not least among these has painting been advanced and adorned by her. For indeed Apollodorus the painter, the first of men to discover the gradation and blending of shading, was an Athenian; and upon his works
was inscribed, "someone will find fault rather than imitate." And Euphranor and Nicias and Asclepiodorus and Pleistaenetus, the brother of Phidias — some of these painted victorious generals, others battles, others heroes; as when Euphranor compared his own Theseus with that of Parrhasius, saying that the latter's Theseus had fed on roses, but his own on beef. For in truth Parrhasius's Theseus is painted
with delicacy and finish, and has a certain resemblance to life; but of Euphranor's Theseus someone, on seeing it, said not unaptly that it resembled "the people of great-hearted Erechtheus, whom Athena, daughter of Zeus, once nurtured." Euphranor also painted the cavalry battle at Mantinea against Epaminondas, not without a certain inspiration. The event unfolded as follows: Epaminondas the Theban, after the battle at Leuctra, was lifted up in pride and resolved to trample upon fallen Sparta and to tread down the
pride and dignity of the city. And he set about it. First, invading with seventy thousand troops, he ravaged the countryside and caused the outlying peoples to revolt from the Spartans; then, around Mantinea, he challenged those drawn up for battle. But when they were unwilling and did not dare to fight, waiting instead for the reinforcement from Athens, he rose by night, and, eluding everyone, marched down into Laconia, and very nearly succeeded in seizing and occupying the undefended city
by a sudden assault. But when the allies perceived it and reinforcements came swiftly to the city, he made a show of turning again to plunder and lay waste the countryside; and having thus deceived and lulled the enemy to sleep, he broke camp by night from Laconia, and, hurrying through the intervening country, appeared before the Mantineans unexpectedly, while they were still deliberating about sending
aid to Lacedaemon, and he immediately ordered the Thebans to arm themselves. So the Thebans, full of confidence, advanced under arms and surrounded the walls on every side. Among the Mantineans there was panic, shouting, and running about, since they were unable to withstand the enemy's force falling upon them like a flood, nor could they think of any way to help themselves. At that critical moment, by a stroke of fortune, the Athenians were coming down from the
heights into the territory of Mantinea, not knowing the turning point or the sharpness of the struggle, but proceeding along the road at their leisure. But when one of them ran ahead and reported the danger, though they were few in comparison to the number of the enemy, and were weary from the march, and none of the other allies was present, still most of them at once fell into formation. And the cavalry,
having equipped themselves and ridden out ahead, fought a fierce cavalry battle right under the gates and the wall itself, and, prevailing, snatched Mantinea out of the hands of Epaminondas. This is the deed that Euphranor painted, and one can see in the picture of the battle the clash and the resistance, full of strength, spirit, and passion. But I do not think you would set the painter in judgment against
the general, nor would you tolerate those who prefer the painted panel to the trophy, and the imitation to the reality. Yet Simonides calls painting silent poetry, and poetry speaking painting. For the deeds that painters display as happening, these words narrate and record as having happened. And if the one group makes the same things clear with colors and shapes, the other with names and
words, they differ in the material and manner of imitation, but the end set before both is one and the same; and the best of historians is the one who, like a painter, has made his narrative vivid with emotions and characters. Thucydides, at any rate, always strives with his prose for this vividness, wishing to make the listener a spectator, as it were, and to produce in his readers the same feelings of astonishment and disturbance that were felt by those who actually witnessed the events,
eagerly pursuing this effect. For there is Demosthenes drawing up the Athenians right along the surf itself at Pylos, and Brasidas urging on the helmsman to run the ship aground and pressing forward to the gangway, being wounded and fainting and sinking back toward the oar-passage; and the Lacedaemonians fighting a land battle from the sea, and the Athenians fighting a sea battle from the land. And again, in the Sicilian narrative, "the infantry
of both sides, while the naval battle hung in the balance, sustaining an unforgettable struggle and a straining of spirit" because of the close formations, so that "the continuous rivalry, and their very bodies swaying together in fear to match the fortunes of the fight," through the arrangement and shaping of the events, produces a vividness proper to painting. So that if it is not fitting to compare painters with generals, then let us not compare historians with them either. Now then, the
battle of Marathon — the man who announced it, as Heraclides of Pontus records, was Thersippus of Erchia; but most say it was Eucles, who ran still hot from the battle, weapons in hand, and, bursting in at the doors of the leading citizens, said only this much, "Rejoice, we have won," and then immediately expired. Yet this man came as his own messenger of the battle, having himself been a combatant in it. But suppose someone, standing above
some hill or lookout point of goatherds or shepherds, had watched the struggle from a distance, and, having observed that great deed, greater than any account of it, had come into the city as an unwounded, bloodless messenger, and then had claimed to receive the honors that Cynegeirus received, that Callimachus received, that Polyzelus received, simply because he had reported these men's feats of valor, wounds, and deaths — would this not seem to surpass all shamelessness? After all, they say the Spartans sent the man who brought word of the victory at Mantinea — the one Thucydides has recorded — nothing more than a piece of meat from the common mess as his reward for good news.
And indeed the writers of history are a kind of messengers of deeds, messengers with fine voices, who reach us through the beauty and power of their language; and to them a reward for good news is owed by those who first encounter their accounts and learn from them what happened. They are praised, of course, and they are remembered and read — but on account of the men who succeeded. For the words do not create the deeds; it is because of the deeds that the words are judged worth hearing at all.
Poetry, too, won its charm and its honor by saying things that resemble what was actually done, as Homer put it: "he told many falsehoods, making them like the truth." There is also a story that one of Menander's intimates said to him, "The Dionysia is almost here, Menander, and you haven't composed your comedy?" And he replied, "By the gods, I certainly have composed the comedy: the plot is fully worked out; I only have to fit the little verses to it." For even the poets themselves consider the matter more essential and more authoritative than the words.
And Corinna admonished Pindar, when he was still young and making a swaggering display of his eloquence, telling him he was no true poet because he did not compose myths, which is the proper business of poetry, whereas rare words, strained usages, paraphrases, melodies, and rhythms are mere seasonings added to the matter. Taking her words very much to heart, Pindar composed that famous song: "Ismenus, or Melia of the golden distaff, or Cadmus, or the holy race of the Sown Men, or the mighty strength of Heracles, or the gladdening honor of Dionysus..." When he showed it to Corinna, she laughed and said that one should sow with the hand, not with the whole sack. For Pindar really had mixed together and heaped up a whole seed-jumble of myths and poured it into the song.
But that poetry is concerned with myth-making, Plato too has said. And a myth aims to be an account that is false but resembles a true one; hence it stands at a great remove from actual deeds, if an account is an image and phantom of a deed, and a myth an image and phantom of an account. And those who invent deeds fall as far short of those who record them as those who merely speak lag behind those who act.
In epic poetry, then, the city has had no famous practitioner, nor in lyric; for Cinesias seems to have been a wretched composer of dithyrambs, and he himself proved barren and without renown, while by being mocked and jeered at by the comic poets he came into a fame that was hardly a happy one. As for the dramatists, the Athenians considered comedy so undignified and vulgar that there was a law forbidding any member of the Areopagus to write comedies. But tragedy flowered and won renown, becoming a marvelous thing for the people of that age to hear and to see, and offering through its myths and its passions a deception, as Gorgias says, in which the one who deceives is more honest than the one who does not, and the one who is deceived is wiser than the one who is not. For the deceiver is more honest, because he has done what he promised; and the deceived is wiser, because anything not utterly insensible is easily captivated by the pleasure of words.
What benefit, then, did the fine tragedies bring to Athens comparable to the way Themistocles' shrewdness walled the city, or Pericles' diligence adorned the acropolis, or Miltiades set her free, or Cimon led her forward to supremacy? If the wisdom of Euripides, the eloquence of Sophocles, and the mouth of Aeschylus in the same way rid the city of any of its troubles or won her any brilliant success, then it is indeed fair to set the dramas alongside the trophies, to raise up the theater against the generals' headquarters, and to weigh the poets' production records against the commanders' feats of valor.
Shall we, then, bring in the men themselves, carrying the tokens and emblems of their works, and give each company its own entrance? From one side let the poets come forward, to the sound of pipes and lyres, speaking and singing: "Keep holy silence, and stand aside from our choruses, whoever is untried in such words, or is not pure in mind, or has never sung or danced the rites of the noble Muses, nor been initiated into the Bacchic mysteries of the tongue of Cratinus the bull-eater" — carrying costumes and masks and altars and stage machinery and revolving scenery and victory tripods. And with them let the tragic actors join the procession — the Nicostratuses and Callippideses and Mynniscuses, the Theodoruses and Poluses — like the beauticians and litter-bearers of tragedy as of some extravagant woman, or rather like the encaustic painters and gilders and dyers who attend upon statues. And let there be furnished a costly choregia (the sponsor's outlay for a production) and an unmanageable crowd of props and masks and purple trailing robes and stage machinery and chorus-trainers and spear-bearers.
Looking at all this, a Laconian said, not badly, that the Athenians were greatly at fault in squandering their seriousness on play — that is, in lavishing on the theater the costs of great naval expeditions and the provisioning of armies. For if what each drama cost is reckoned up, the Athenian people will be found to have spent more on Bacchaes and Phoenician Women and Oedipuses and Antigone and the woes of Medea and Electra than on the wars they fought against the barbarians for supremacy and for freedom. For the generals often ordered their men to bring rations that needed no cooking, and so led them out to battle; and the trierarchs, by Zeus, supplied their rowers with barley meal, with onions and cheese for relish, and so put them aboard the triremes; but the choregoi set eels and lettuces and hams and marrow before their choristers, and feasted them lavishly over a long stretch of time while they trained their voices and lived in luxury. And the upshot of all this, for the losers, was to be insulted into the bargain and made objects of ridicule; while the winners got the tripod — which is not a votive offering for victory, as Demetrius says, but a last libation over livelihoods poured out, an empty tomb of bankrupted estates. Such are the returns of the poetic art, and nothing more splendid ever comes of them.
Now let us watch the generals as they come in from the other side. As they pass, truly "keep holy silence and stand aside" — you who are men of no action, who have never held office or borne arms — "whoever lacks daring for such deeds and is not pure in mind, and has never been initiated into the Bacchic mysteries of the hand of Miltiades the Mede-slayer or of Themistocles the Persian-killer." This is the revel-procession of Ares, weighed down with phalanxes from the land and fleets from the sea and with mingled spoils and trophies. "Hear, Alala, daughter of War, prelude of spears, to whom men are offered up in death as a holy sacrifice," as Epaminondas the Theban said — men who give themselves, for fatherland and tombs and temples, to the noblest and most brilliant of contests.
And their Victories, it seems to me, come forward dragging no ox or goat as a prize, nor wreathed with ivy and reeking of Dionysiac wine-lees. No: whole cities belong to them, and islands and continents, temples costing a thousand talents and colonies of ten thousand settlers; and they are crowned with trophies of every kind and with spoils. Their images and emblems are hundred-foot Parthenons, southern walls, ship-sheds, Propylaea, the Chersonese, Amphipolis. Marathon escorts the Victory of Miltiades, and Salamis that of Themistocles, standing upon the wreckage of a thousand hulls. The Victory of Cimon brings a hundred Phoenician triremes from the Eurymedon; that of Demosthenes and Cleon brings from Sphacteria the captured shield of Brasidas and Spartans in chains. The Victory of Conon walls the city; that of Thrasybulus brings the people home free from Phyle; those of Alcibiades raise the city up again after her stumble in Sicily. And from the contests of Neileus and Androclus around Lydia and Caria, Hellas beheld Ionia rising up.
But if you ask each of the other cities what good has come to it from itself, one will say Lesbos, another Samos, another Cyprus, another the Euxine Sea, another five hundred triremes, another ten thousand talents — a mere dowry compared to Athens's glory and trophies.
These are the things this city celebrates, and for these it sacrifices to the gods — not for the victories of Aeschylus or Sophocles, nor for the times when Carcinus staged his Aerope or Astydamas his Hector, but on the sixth of Boedromion, even now, the city celebrates the victory at Marathon; on the sixteenth of the month wine is poured in celebration of Chabrias's naval victory off Naxos; and on the twelfth they used to offer thank-offerings
for freedom — for on that day the men from Phyle came down into the city. On the third of the month they commemorated their victory in the battle at Plataea. The sixteenth of Munichion they consecrated to Artemis, since it was when the Greeks were winning at Salamis that the goddess shone forth as a full moon. And the twelfth of Scirophorion was made still more sacred by the battle of Mantinea, in which, when the rest of the allies were driven back and put to flight, the Athenians alone,
fighting on their own, won the day and set up a trophy over the very enemies who had been winning. These are the things that raised the city to glory, these to greatness. For these Pindar called Athens “the bulwark of Hellas” — not because they steadied the Greeks with the tragedies of Phrynichus and Thespis, but because, as he himself says, first at Artemisium “the sons of the Athenians laid the shining foundation of freedom”; and at Salamis and
Mycale and Plataea, standing firm like adamant, they secured the freedom of Greece and handed it down to the rest of mankind. But, by Zeus, these are only the playthings of poets. The orators, however, have something worth setting beside the generals — which is why Aeschines, mocking Demosthenes, quite plausibly says he is threatening to bring a lawsuit from the speaker's platform against the general's headquarters. Is it, then, worth ranking Hyperides's Plataicus above
Aristides's victory at Plataea? Or Lysias's speech against the Thirty above the tyrant-slaying of Thrasybulus and Archinus? Or Aeschines's speech against Timarchus for prostitution above Phocion's relief expedition to Byzantium, by which he kept the sons of the allies from becoming an object of outrage and drunken abuse to the Macedonians? Or shall we set Demosthenes's speech On the Crown beside the public crowns which Phocion received for liberating Greece — a speech in which
the orator made his most brilliant and eloquent stroke by swearing by the ancestors who risked their lives first at Marathon, not by the men who taught boys their lessons in the schools. It was these men — not Isocrates, Antiphon, or Isaeus — whom the city buried at public expense, receiving back the remains of their bodies, and it was these men the orator all but deified with his oath, swearing by men he did not imitate. As for Isocrates,
though he said that the men who first risked their lives at Marathon fought as if with souls not their own, and though he sang the praises of their daring and their contempt for life, he himself, when he had already grown old, is said to have answered someone who asked how he was faring: “As a man past ninety years old, who counts death the worst of evils.” For it was not by sharpening a sword, or engraving a spear-shaft, or polishing
a helmet, nor by serving as a soldier or rowing in the fleet, but by welding together antitheses, balanced clauses, and matching cadences — all but smoothing and shaping his periods with chisel and file — that he grew old. How, then, could such a man fail to fear the clash of weapons and the crash of the battle line, when he was afraid even to let one vowel collide with another, or to produce a clause falling short by a single syllable of matching its counterpart? Miltiades, for his part, set out for Marathon, joined
battle the next day, and returned to the city with his army victorious; and Pericles, having subdued the Samians in nine months, thought more of himself than Agamemnon, who took Troy only in the tenth year. Isocrates, meanwhile, spent nearly three Olympiads composing his Panegyricus, without in all that time serving as a soldier, going on an embassy, founding a city, or being sent out as an admiral — even though that period brought countless wars
in its train. No, in the very years when Timotheus was liberating Euboea, Chabrias was fighting a sea battle off Naxos, Iphicrates near Lechaeum was cutting the Spartan regiment to pieces, and the Athenian people, having freed every city, made all of Greece their equal in the vote, Isocrates sat at home reshaping a book with fine phrases — for as long a time as it took Pericles to raise the Propylaea and the hundred-foot temples. And yet even Pericles, for working so slowly on his projects, was mocked
by Cratinus, who says something like this about the middle wall: “For Pericles advances it in words, but does not so much as move it in deeds.” Consider, then, the pettiness of the sophist's mind, spending a ninth of his life on a single speech. But, by Zeus, is it really worth comparing the speeches of Demosthenes the orator to the deeds of a general — his speech Against Conon for Assault to that man's trophies at Pylos?
Or his speech Against Arethusius concerning slaves to the Spartans that man reduced to slavery? Or the fact that he drafted the decree about the settlers, when it was Alcibiades who, winning over the Mantineans and Eleans, brought this alliance to bear against Lacedaemon? And indeed the public speeches have this remarkable feature: in the Philippics he urges men on to action, and he praises the measure of Leptines.