Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata

Plutarch

Plutarch. Moralia, Vol. III. Babbitt, Frank Cole, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1931 (printing).

Whenever Pericles was about to take command of the army, as he was donning his general’s cloak, he used to say to himself, Take care, Pericles; you

are about to command free-born men who are both Greeks and Athenians. [*](Cf. Moralia, 620 C and 813 D.)

He bade the Athenians remove Aegina, that sore on the eye of the Piraeus. [*](Ibid. 803 A; Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, chap. viii. (156 D) and Life of Demosthenes, chap. i. (846 C): Aristotle, Rhetoric, iii. 10. Athenaeus (99 D) attributes the expression to Demades, an Athenian orator. The people of Aegina, who were Dorian, had been hostile towards the Athenians even before the Persian wars, and in the early years of the Peloponnesian war (431 B.C.) they were forcibly removed from the island by the Athenians.)

To a friend who wanted him to bear false witness, which included also an oath, he answered that he was a friend as far as the altar. [*](Cf. Moralia, 531 C and 808 A, and Aulus Gellius, i. 3.)

On his death-bed he accounted himself happy in that no Athenian, because of him, had ever put on a black garment.[*](Given with more details in Moralia, 543 C, and Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, chap. xxxviii. (173 c), and Julian, Oration iii. 128 D.)