History of the Peloponnesian War

Besides, if they should be disappointed in this, they would proceed against your territory, and to the remainder of your allies, such as Brasidas did not reach: and you will have to exert yourselves, not so much for territory which does not belong to you, as for your own confederacy and country.

Ath.

On this point you, as well as others, may learn by actual experience, and not remain ignorant, that from no single siege did the Athenians ever yet retreat through fear of others.

But it strikes us, that though you said you would consult for the safety of your country, you have in all this long discussion advanced nothing which men might trust to for thinking that they would be saved; but your strongest points depend on hope and futurity, while your present resources are too scanty, compared with those at present opposed to you, to give you a chance of escape. And so you afford proof of great folly in your views, if you do not even yet, after allowing us to retire, adopt some counsel more prudent than this.

For you surely will not betake yourselves to that shame, which in dangers that are disgraceful, because foreseen, destroys men more than any thing else. For in the case of many men, though they foresee all the time what they are running into, the thing which is called disgrace, by the influence of a seducing name, allures them on, enslaved as they are to the word, in fact to fall wilfully into irretrievable disasters, and to incur a shame more shameful as the attendant on folly than on fortune.