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[4] Thucydides belonged to the party of the ‘Good and True,’ and was for a very long time a political antagonist of Pericles. When Archidamus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, asked him whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler, he replied: ‘Whenever I throw him in wrestling, he disputes the fall, and carries his point, and persuades the very men who saw him fall.’

The truth is, however, that even Pericles, with all his gifts, was cautious in his discourse, so that whenever he came forward to speak he prayed the gods that there might not escape him unawares a single word which was unsuited to the matter under discussion.

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