[64]
When we lost our fleet in the Hellespont1 and our city was plunged into the disasters of that time, who of our older men does not know that the “people's party,”2 as they were called, were ready to go to any length of hardship to avoid doing what the enemy commanded, deeming it monstrous that anyone should see the city which had ruled over the Hellenes in subjection to another state, whereas the partisans of oligarchy were ready both to tear down the walls3 and to submit to slavery?
1 At the Battle of Arginusae, 406 B. C., the beginning of the end of the Peloponnesian War.
2 Many of them had been exiled by the Thirty or had fled for their lives. Thrasybulus placed himself at their head, defeated the Thirty in battle, and restored the democracy. See Xen. Hell. 2.4.10 ff.
3 One of the terms insisted on by Lysander was that the “long walls” connecting Athens with the Piraeus be demolished.
Isocrates. Isocrates with an English Translation in three volumes, by George Norlin, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1980.
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