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sound judgment, are full of hope in the midst of perils. Your acts fall below your ability; you trust not in the safest determinations of judgment; from peril you despair of ever being extricated. 4. It is the strife of the ever-ready with the everprocrastinating, of the roamer abroad with the dweller at home. To leave their possessions, they think the way to enlarge them. You think to invade others, the way to lose what you have. Victorious, they press on farther, and beaten, they despond less than all other men. 5. Their bodies they squander for the state, as if they were the bodies of other persons; their best thoughts they cultivate, as somewhat most cherished and personal, for her. 6. If they fail to accomplish their whole plan of conquest, they deem themselves robbed of their own; if they succeed, they consider that they have had the fortune to do little compared with what is left to do. Defeated in one enterprise, they substitute for success, hope; and to them alone, so promptly do they put their plans into execution, are fruition and expectation the same. 7. Thus ever in labors and perils, do they wear out life. Less than all others do they enjoy what they have, because they are ever striving to acquire. For them to do what ought to be done, is the only festival of life, and in their mind repose, accomplishing nothing, is as great an evil as occupation the most laborious. 8. So that one might, in a word, justly characterise them as a race born neither to rest themselves, nor to permit it to others.

LXXI. "And yet, Lacedæmonians, with such a State in array against you, you hesitate. You do not consider that peace is sure to be longest theirs who, while they practise what is right, yet announce their determination to submit to nothing wrong; but you do what is right with the policy and upon the principle of neither inflicting injury on others, nor of being subjected to injury in resorting to self-defence. 2. This you could scarcely effect, even if your next neighbor were guided by a policy exactly the same; but now your system, as against such as they, is obsolete. It is a law of human life that new policy, like a last innovation in art, should ever triumph. 3. For a State wholly still, unchanging customs are best; but for one which is impelled to much and various novelty of enterprise, new arts of policy are indispensable. Hence, in Athens, practised in a larger variety of national experience, all is newer than with you. 4. Of all this procrastination, let this be the end. Succor at once us and the Potidæans by invading Attica; them, lest you abandon friends and kindred to the enemy; us, lest you compel us in despair to seek other alliance. 5. In such a measure we should be guilty of no crime, neither in the sight of the gods who enforce oaths, nor in that of men who appre

ciate them; for it is not they who, deserted by their allies, seek new ones, but they who withhold assistance from those to whom they have sworn it, that are the breakers of truce. 6. But if you will be prompt to help us, we remain with you. It were unjust to change our connection, nor elsewhere could we find those more congenial to us. 7. Judge wisely, then, on these things, and see to it that that supremacy in Peloponnesus which you have inherited, you preserve unimpaired."

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LXXII. Such was the discourse of the Corinthians. pened that there was at that moment an embassy of the Athenians in Sparta, which had been sent thither before for other objects. Having ascertained what had been said, they judged it expedient to wait on the assembly of the Lacedæmonians, not for the purpose of answering to the accusations which the cities had preferred, but to intimate in relation to the general subject a caution not to decide rashly, but to weigh maturely. They desired too to set forth the power of Athens, to remind the old of what they knew, and to inform the young of what they did not, supposing that this would turn their hearts rather to peace than to war. 2. Going, therefore, to the Lacedæmonians, they declared a wish to say somewhat to the assembly, unless it should be forbidden. 3. They directed them to enter; whereupon, having done so, they said,

LXXIII. "The object of our embassy was not to make defence against your allies, but different and more general. Learning, however, that a very vehement outcry has been here raised against us, we present ourselves, not to repel the accusation of the parties, for this were to try a cause before those neither our judges nor their judges; but lest, persuaded by your allies, you should adopt unwise counsels upon a subject of vast importance. We have desired, too, in reference to the entire discourse which has arraigned us, to demonstrate that what we possess we have not unfairly acquired, and that Athens may challenge a just glory. 2. Of the remote past, of which tradition, not your own eyes, is the witness, why need we speak? But of the Persian war, and of the events which have passed under your own observation, irksome though it is to us so often to display them, we must say something. For what we then did was an achievement of peril, effected for the general good. You shared that good; let us be indulged,-whatever its value, in a share of the glory. We shall recall these things, too, not so much for excuse and deprecation, as to remind you with what manner of city, if unwise counsels guide you, the contest must be. 4. We aver, then, that at Marathon we foremost and alone encountered the peril of barbarian war. Invaded a second time, unable to resist on land, we embarked with our whole people on the sea,

and fought his fleet at Salamis. The effect of that victory was to hinder his ships from successively attacking and destroying the cities of the Peloponnesus, since against a naval force so overwhelming, they could not have defended themselves. 5. Of the great results of that victory, he himself offered a proof the most signal; for his fleet being defeated, appreciating the great diminution and comparative inferiority of his force, at once, with most of his army, he retreated.

LXXIV. "To this great achievement, demonstrating that Greece existed but in her navy, we contributed in three particulars most effectively, the largest number of ships, a commander the most consummate in capacity, and zeal the most untiring. We furnished towards the whole fleet of four hundred sail a little less than two parts in three; we furnished for commander, Themistocles, who, more than all others, was instrumental in bringing on the battle of Salamis, whose wisdom saved Greece, whom you yourselves, for a service so transcendent, honored as you never honored a stranger guest before. 2. We displayed a zeal the most daring, since on land, no one helping us, every State as far as Athens submitting, we resolved not to desert the cause of those allies who still remained to us, to take no offence that you had not extended a prompter aid, not to render ourselves useless by dispersing; but to embark and dare the perils of naval war. 3. We boast, therefore, to have conferred on you as much benefit as we have received. You, fearing rather for yourselves than for us,—for before we were attacked, you came not near us,-issued forth at length to aid, from cities unwasted, - your cities, to preserve them for yourselves. We, sallying out from a city that had ceased to exist, and perilling ourselves on a chance, only not desperate, at once, in some real sense and measure, saved you and ourselves. But had we, in the first instance, from fear yielded, like others, to the Persian, or had we not dared, as already ruined, to embark, you could have fought no naval battle, for you had no ships; and all things would have quietly fallen into the exact course which he desired.

LXXV. "Say, then, Lacedæmonians, considering the zeal and the wisdom of the counsels with which we met that day, ought the empire we have won to subject us to such a burden of the envy of Greece? 2. That empire we did not grasp by violence, but acquired it by your declining the prosecution of the war against the barbarian to its close, and by the allies coming to us and entreating us to permit them to elevate us to the command. 3. Once acquired, from the nature of supremacy, we were forced, in the first instance, to elevate it to its present height, chiefly by reason of the jealousy of others; in part, too,

for our glory, in part for our profit. 4. It seemed unsafe that we, odious to the greater number, (some of them actually reduced from open revolt-yourselves no longer friendly as at first, but distrustful and at variance with us,) should risk the hazards of resigning command; for the revolters from us would have gone to you. 5. Surely, it is no cause of reproach to any to meet with prudence the great crises of their affairs.

LXXVI. "Yourselves, Lacedæmonians, having imposed upon the States of Peloponnesus a polity to subserve your own interests, rule them; and had you continued, as we did, to exercise command, always odious, through and since the war, you, too, would have become equally the object of hatred with the allies, and would have been, as we are, obliged to govern with a firm hand, or to subject yourselves to great peril. 2. We say, then, we have done nothing so wonderful or so totally out of the course of human action, in just accepting a supremacy which was proffered to us, and in so far yielding to the transcendent considerations of glory, fear, and advantage, as not to give it away. Nor are we the originators of such a precedent, since ever it was the decree that the weaker should be commanded by the stronger. Let us say, too, that we hold ourselves worthy of this rule; nor did you deem us not so, until now, when interest prompts you to begin to discourse of justice, justice, no love of which ever yet restrained the acquisitions of power."

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TRANSLATION FROM TACITUS.

October, 1845.

I AM reading, meditating, and translating the first of Greek historians, Thucydides. I study the Greek critically in Passow, (Liddell and Scott,) Bloomfield, Arnold, and Duker; and the history in Mitford, Thirlwall, Wachsmuth, Hermann, &c., &c., and translate faithfully, yet with some attention to English words and construction; and my purpose is to study deeply the Greece of the age of Pericles, and all its warnings to the liberty and the anti-unionisms of my own country and time.

For purposes more purely rhetorical, I would translate and study Tacitus, too; and (somewhat abruptly, for I am a little way advanced in the study of his immortal work) begin with the death of Germanicus. My helps are Ernesti, Lipsius, Ruperti, and the common historians, Leverett's Dictionary, and Murphy; and my object is an elegant, yet true and resembling version, and a collection of rhetorical sentiments and phrases, and of general wisdom. I begin October 9, 1845.

ANNALS. BOOK II.-CHAPTER 70.

THESE proceedings of Piso exasperated Germanicus as much as they alarmed him. "If my threshold," he said, " is to be beseiged, if my blood is to be poured out under the eye of my enemies, what will befall my most wretched wife; what my children, yet infants? Piso thinks poison too slow! He hastens; he presses eagerly onward that he may grasp the province and the legions in his single hand. But he shall learn that Germanicus is not yet wholly vanquished; nor shall the murderer earn the reward of his crime of blood." He composed letters to Piso, in which he renounced his friendship. According to the relation of most writers, he added a command that he should depart from the province. Without more delay Piso set sail, yet proceeded slowly on his voyage that he might have the less distance to return if the death of Germanicus should open to him the gates of Syria.

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