History of the Peloponnesian War

Such a course you will avoid, if you take wise counsel, and you will not consider it degrading to acknowledge yourselves inferior to the most powerful state when it offers you moderate terms—to become allies, keeping your own territory but paying tribute—and, when a choice is given you of war or safety, not to hold out stubbornly for the worse alternative. Since those who, while refusing to submit to their equals, yet comport themselves wisely towards their superiors and are moderate towards their inferiors—these, we say, are most likely to prosper.

Consider, then, once more after our withdrawal, and reflect many times in your deliberations that your fatherland is at stake, your one and only fatherland, and that upon one decision only will depend her fate for weal or woe.”

So the Athenians retired from the conference; and the Melians, after consulting together in private, finding themselves of much the same opinion as they had expressed before, answered as follows:

“Men of Athens, our opinion is no other than it was at first, nor will we in a short moment rob of its liberty a city which has been inhabited already seven hundred years[*](Evidently a merely general statement, carrying us back to the time of the Dorian invasion. Conon, Narrat. 36, mentions the Spartan Philonomus as founder of Melos, soon after the Dorians settled at Sparta. See Müller, Orchomenos, p. 317.); but trusting to the fortune which by divine favour has preserved her hitherto, and to such help as men, even the Lacedaemonians, can give, we shall try to win our deliverance.

But we propose to you that we be your friends, but enemies to neither combatant, and that you withdraw from our territory, after making such a truce as may seem suitable for both of us.”

Such was the answer of the Melians; and the Athenians, as they were quitting the conference, said: “Then, as it seems to us, judging by the result of these deliberations of yours, you are the only men who regard future events as more certain than what lies before your eyes, and who look upon that which is out of sight, merely because you wish it, as already realized. You have staked your all, putting your trust in the Lacedaemonians, in fortune and in fond hopes; and with your all you will come to ruin.”