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"For what utterly shameful deed have they not planned, what deed most shocking have they not perpetrated? It is a distinctive mark of greed that a man, not being content with his own gifts of Fortune, covets those which are distant and belong to someone else; and this these men have done. For though the Athenians were the most prosperous of all the Greeks, dissatisfied with their felicity as if it were a heavy burden, they longed to portion out to colonists Sicily, separated as it was from them by so great an expanse of sea, after they had sold the inhabitants into slavery. [2] It is a terrible thing to begin a war, when one has not first been wronged; yet that is what they did. For though they were your friends until then, on a sudden, without warning, with an armament of such strength they laid siege to Syracusans. [3] It is characteristic of arrogant men, anticipating the decision of Fortune, to decree the punishment of peoples not yet conquered; and this also they have not left undone. For before the Athenians ever set foot on Sicily they approved a resolution to sell into slavery the citizens of Syracuse and Selinus and to compel the remaining Sicilians to pay tribute. When there is to be found in the same men greediness, treachery, arrogance, what person in his right mind would show them mercy? [4] How then, mark you, did the Athenians treat the Mitylenaeans? Why after conquering them, although the Mitylenaeans had no intention of doing them any wrong but only desired their freedom, they voted to put to the sword all the inhabitants of the city.1 [5] A cruel and barbarous deed. And that crime too they committed against Greeks, against allies, against men who had often been their benefactors. Let them not now complain if, after having done such things to the rest of mankind, they themselves shall receive like punishment; for it is altogether just that a man should accept his lot without complaint when he is himself affected by the law he has laid down for others. [6] What shall I say also of the Melians,2 whom they reduced by siege and slew from the youth upward? and of the Scionaeans,3 who, although their kinsmen, shared the same fate as the Melians? Consequently two peoples who had fallen foul of Attic fury had left not even any of their number to perform the rites over the bodies of their dead. [7] It is not Scythians who committed such deeds, but the people who claim to excel in love of mankind have by their decrees utterly destroyed these cities. Consider now what they would have done if they had sacked the city of the Syracusans; for men who dealt with their kinsmen with such savagery would have devised a harsher punishment for a people with whom they had not ties of blood.

1 This decree was not actually carried out; cp. Book 12.55.8 f.

2 Cp. Book 12.80.5.

3 Cp. Book 12.76.3.

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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