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For though the supremacy which the Persians enjoy entails, for the satisfaction of cupidity, the gifts they require, yet a tyrant's greed does not overlook even any small gain.1 [2]

For the surest guardian of safety is mistrust. [3]

Now children, when they are being ill treated, turn for aid to their parents, but states turn to the peoples who once founded them.2 [4]

A tyrant's greed does not rest satisfied with what he possesses, but it yearns after the property of others and is never sated. [5]

As for those whose character will oppose his domination, he will not, when the opportunity offers, allow them to become powerful. [6]

For you are descendants of those men who have bequeathed to glory their own virtues, deathless after their death. [7]

For as the reward for the alliance it is not money he requires, which one can often see despised by even the lowest man in private life when he has once gained wealth, but praise and glory, to gain which noble men do not hesitate to die; for the reward which glory offers is to be preferred above silver. [8]

For the inheritance which the Spartans receive from their fathers is not wealth, as is the case with all other men, but an eagerness to die for the sake of liberty, so that they set all the good things which life can offer second to glory. [9]

Let us not in our eagerness for mercenary troops throw away our own citizen forces, and, in reaching for what is unseen, lose our mastery of that which is in sight. [10]

I deny that I am dismayed at the magnitude of the Persians' armaments; for valour decides the issue of war, not numbers. [11]

For the inheritance they have received from their fathers is to live their own lives, and to die in response to their country's need. [12]

Why should we fear the gold with which they deck themselves out as they go into battle, as women deck themselves for marriage, since as a result victory will bring us the prize not only of glory, but of wealth? For valour fears not gold, which cold steel has ever taken captive, but the military skill of the leaders. [13]

For every army which exceeds the proper proportion carries in itself its undoing in almost every case. For before the serried ranks have heard the command we shall have anticipated them in obtaining our objectives.Const. Exc. 4, pp. 301-302.

1 This and the following excerpts may well be from the speeches of the Greeks as they weighed the choice between fighting the Persians, with possible defeat, and putting themselves under the tyrant Gelon.

2 That is, the mother-cities of Greece should not seek aid from the colonies they had once founded in Sicily.

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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