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Submission of the Messenians

For my part, I never concur with those who indulge their anger against men of their own blood to the length of not only depriving them of the year's harvest when at war with them, but even of cutting down their trees and destroying their buildings, and of leaving them no opportunity for repentance. Such proceedings seem to me to be rank folly. For, while they imagine that they are dismaying the enemy by the devastation of their territory, and the deprivation of their future as well as their present means of getting the necessaries of life, they are all the while exasperating the men, and converting an isolated ebullition of anger into a lasting hatred. . . .

Histories. Polybius. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh. translator. London, New York. Macmillan. 1889. Reprint Bloomington 1962.

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This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry, Running heads in Walbank's reprint have been converted to chapter titles, and titles have been added, usually from the marginal notes, for chapters without them. Some pages have notes of the form "line X: A should read B," which I believe are Walbank's; they have "resp=fww". Summaries of missing sections are encoded as inline notes with "resp=ess." A very few unidentified quotations are marked in notes with "resp=aem" (the markup editor) Citations are marked using Perseus abbreviations. and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

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  • Commentary references to this page (1):
    • Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita libri, erklärt von M. Weissenborn, books 43-44, commentary, 44.13
  • Cross-references to this page (4):
    • A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890), COSMI
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), LYCASTUS
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), LYCTUS
    • Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), PHALASARNA
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