In former days, after the battle of Salamis, our city stood in high repute, and although our walls had been thrown down by the barbarians, yet so long as we had peace with the Lacedaemonians we preserved our democratic form of government.1 But when certain men had stirred up trouble and finally caused us to become involved in war with the Lacedaemonians, then, after we had suffered and inflicted many losses, Miltiades, the son of Cimon, who was proxenus2 of the Lacedaemonians, negotiated with them, and we made a truce for fifty years, and kept it thirteen years.3
1 Aeschines has taken the historical review which he gives in Aeschin. 2.172-176 from the speech of Andocides, On the Peace with the Lacedaemonians （Andoc. 3.3 ff.） , condensing, and changing the phraseology at will, and changing the application of the facts which he cites. This sketch as given by Andocides is characterized by Eduard Meyer （Forschungen zur Alten Geschichte, 2.132 ff.） as a caricature of the actual course of events, valuable only as a convincing proof of the untrustworthiness of oral tradition, and of the rapidity and certainty with which confusion and error as to historical facts develop, even in the mind of a contemporary who has had a prominent part in the events.
2 The proxenus was a citizen who was employed by a foreign state to represent its interests in his own state.
3 This was in fact a five years' truce negotiated by Cimon, the son of Miltiades, in 450 b c. The truce lasted, not thirteen years, but less than five. The fortification of the Peiraeus belongs more than a quarter of a century earlier.
Aeschines. Aeschines with an English translation by Charles Darwin Adams, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1919.
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