previous next
140A.

Such was the lineage of Alexander son of Amyntas. When he came to Athens from Mardonius who had sent him, he spoke as follows : “This, Athenians, is what Mardonius says to you:—there is a message come to me from the king, saying, ‘I forgive the Athenians all the offenses which they have committed against me; [2] and now, Mardonius, I bid you do this:—Give them back their territory and let them choose more for themselves besides, where ever they will, and dwell under their own laws. Rebuild all their temples which I burnt, if they will make a pact with me.’ This is the message, and I must obey it (says Mardonius), unless you take it upon yourselves to hinder me. [3] This too I say to you:—Why are you so insane as to wage war against the king? You cannot overcome him, nor can you resist him forever. As for the multitude of Xerxes' army, what it did, you have seen, and you have heard of the power that I now have with me. Even if you overcome and conquer us (whereof, if you be in your right minds, you can have no hope), yet there will come another host many times as great as this. [4] Be not then minded to match yourselves against the king, and thereby lose your land and always be yourselves in jeopardy, but make peace. This you can most honorably do since the king is that way inclined. Keep your freedom, and agree to be our brothers in arms in all faith and honesty.—

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 (W. W. How, J. Wells)
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.
Athens (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (3 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (2):
    • Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 1.3.1
    • Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 1.3.2
  • Cross-references in notes to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: