History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Thucydides, Vol. 1-4. Smith, Charles Foster, translator. London and Cambridge, MA: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1919-1923.

And no one was eager to practise self-denial in prospect of what was esteemed honour,[*](Or, reading προσταλαιπωρεῖν, to take trouble about what was esteemed honour.) because everyone thought that it was doubtful whether he would live to attain it, but the pleasure of the moment and whatever was in any way conducive to it came to be regarded as at once honourable and expedient.

No fear of gods or law of men restrained; for, on the one hand, seeing that all men were perishing alike, they judged that piety and impiety came to the same thing, and, on the other, no one expected that he would live to be called to account and pay the penalty of his misdeeds. On the contrary, they believed that the penalty already decreed against them, and now hanging over their heads, was a far heavier one, and that before this fell it was only reasonable to get some enjoyment out of life.

Such then was the calamity that had befallen them by which the Athenians were sore pressed, their people dying within the walls and their land being ravaged without.

And in their distress they recalled, as was natural, the following verse which their older men said had long ago been uttered:

  1. A Dorian war shall come and pestilence with it.
A dispute arose, however, among the people, some contending that the word used in the verse by the ancients was not Xot/os, "pestilence," but At/uos, "famine," and the view prevailed at the time that "pestilence" was the original word; and quite naturally, for men's recollections conformed to their sufferings. But if ever another Dorian war should visit them after the present war and a famine happen to come with it, they would probably, I fancy, recite the verse in that way.

Those, too, who were familiar with it, recalled that other oracle given to the Lacedaemonians, when, in answer to their inquiry whether they should go to war, the god responded that if they "warred with all their might victory would be theirs," adding that he himself would assist them.i Now so far as the oracle is concerned, they surmised that what was then happening was its fulfilment, for the plague broke out immediately after the Peloponnesians had invaded Attica;