History of the Peloponnesian War

And he, seeing them vexed with their present calamity and doing all those things which he had before expected, called an assembly (for he was yet general) with intention to put them again into heart and, assuaging their passion, to reduce their minds to a more calm and less dismayed temper. And standing forth, he spake unto them in this manner:

"Your anger towards me cometh not unlooked for, for the cause of it I know. And I have called this assembly, therefore, to remember you and reprehend you for those things wherein you have either been angry with me or given way to your adversity without reason.

For I am of this opinion, that the public prosperity of the city is better for private men than if the private men themselves were in prosperity and the public wealth in decay.

For a private man, though in good estate, if his country come to ruin, must of necessity be ruined with it; whereas he that miscarrieth in a flourishing commonwealth shall much more easily be preserved.

Since then the commonwealth is able to bear the calamities of private men, and everyone cannot support the calamities of the commonwealth, why should not everyone strive to defend it and not, as you now, astonished with domestic misfortune, forsake the common safety and fall a-censuring both me that counselled the war and yourselves that decreed the same as well as I?

And it is I you are angry withal, one, as I think myself, inferior to none either in knowing what is requisite or in expressing what I know, and a lover of my country and superior to money.

For he that hath good thoughts and cannot clearly express them were as good to have thought nothing at all. He that can do both and is ill affected to his country will likewise not give it faithful counsel. And he that will do that too yet if he be superable by money will for that alone set all the rest to sale.

Now if you followed my advice in making this war, as esteeming these virtues to be in me somewhat above the rest, there is sure no reason that I should now be accused of doing you wrong.

"For though to such as have it in their own election (being otherwise in good estate), it were madness to make choice of war; yet when we must of necessity either give way, and so without more ado be subject to our neighbours, or else save ourselves from it by danger, he is more to be condemned that declineth the danger than he that standeth to it.

For mine own part I am the man I was and of the mind I was; but you are changed, won to the war when you were entire but repenting it upon the damage and condemning my counsel in the weakness of your own judgment. The reason of this is because you feel already everyone in particular that which afflicts you, but the evidence of the profit to accrue to the city in general you see not yet.

And your minds, dejected with the great and sudden alteration, cannot constantly maintain what you have before resolved. For that which is sudden and unexpected and contrary to what one hath deliberated enslaveth the spirit, which by this disease principally, in the neck of the other incommodities, is now come to pass in you.

But you that are born in a great city and with education suitable, how great soever the affliction be, ought not to shrink at it and eclipse your reputation (for men do no less condemn those that through cowardice lose the glory they have than hate those that through impudence arrogate the glory they have not) but to set aside the grief of your private losses and lay your hands to the common safety.

"As for the toil of the war, that it may perhaps be long and we in the end never the nearer to victory, though that may suffice which I have demonstrated at other times touching your causeless suspicion that way, yet this I will tell you, moreover, touching the greatness of your means for dominion, which neither you yourselves seem ever to have thought on nor I touched in my former orations, nor would I also have spoken it now but that I see your minds dejected more than there is cause for.