[19]
“To what defeat of your father's do you refer,” said Cyrus, “that you are so confident that he has been brought to discretion by it?”“Why that, by Zeus,” Tigranes answered, “which1 he is conscious of having sustained, inasmuch as when he aimed at securing liberty he has become more of a slave than ever, and as he has not been able to accomplish a single thing of all that he thought he should effect by secrecy or by surprise or by actual force. And he knows that when you desired to outwit him, you did it as effectually as one could do who set out to deceive men blind or deaf or deprived of all their senses; and when you thought you ought to act secretly, you acted with such secrecy that the fortified places which he thought he had provided for his own safety you had secretly turned into prisons for him in advance. And so much did you surpass him in dispatch, that you came from a distance with a large army before he could muster the forces he had at home.”
Xenophon. Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 5 and 6. Walter Miller. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. 1914.
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