History of the Peloponnesian War

However, we cannot but reflect that, although you said[*](See chs. lxxxvii., lxxxviii.) that you would take counsel concerning your deliverance, you have not in this long discussion advanced a single argument that ordinary men[*](ie. men who expect to be saved by human means, not by divine intervention; cf. ch. civ. f.) would put their confidence in if they expected to be delivered. On the contrary, your strongest grounds for confidence are merely cherished hopes whose fulfilment is in the future, whereas your present resources are too slight, compared with those already arrayed against you, for any chance of success.

And you exhibit a quite unreasonable attitude of mind if you do not even now, after permitting us to withdraw, come to some decision that is wiser than your present purpose. For surely you will not take refuge in that feeling which most often brings men to ruin when they are confronted by dangers that are clearly foreseen and therefore disgraceful—the fear of such disgrace. For many men, though they can still clearly foresee the dangers into which they are drifting, are lured on by the power of a seductive word—the thing called disgrace—until, the victims of a phrase, they are indeed plunged, of their own act, into irretrievable calamities, and thus incur in addition a disgrace that is more disgraceful, because associated with folly rather than with misfortune.