previous next
236.

Next spoke Achaemenes, Xerxes' brother and admiral of the fleet; it chanced that he was present during their conversation, and he feared that Xerxes would be persuaded to follow Demaratus' counsel. “O king,” he said, “I see that you are listening to a man who is jealous of your good fortune or is perhaps even a traitor to your cause. These are the ways that are dear to the hearts of all Greeks: they are jealous of success and they hate power. [2] No, if after the recent calamity which has wrecked four hundred of your ships you send away three hundred more from your fleet to sail round the Peloponnese, your enemies will be enough to do battle with you; while your fleet is united, however, it is invincible, and your enemies will not be so many as to be enough to fight; moreover, all your navy will be a help to your army and your army to your navy, both moving together. If you separate some of your fleet from yourself, you will be of no use to them, nor they to you. [3] My counsel is rather that you make your own plans well, and take no account of the business of your adversaries, what battlefields they will choose, what they will do, and how many they are. They are able enough to think for themselves, and we similarly for ourselves. As for the Lacedaemonians, if they meet the Persians in the field, they will in no way repair their most recent losses.”

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Notes (Reginald Walter Macan)
load focus Notes (W. W. How, J. Wells)
load focus Greek (1920)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Peloponnesus (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (20 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: