Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 23 — Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans

Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 23 — Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch; served verbatim

Of Brasidas. Brasidas catching a mouse amongst some dry figs, the mouse bit him; upon which he let her go, and said to his companions, There is nothing so little but it may preserve itself, if it dares resist the invaders. In a battle, being shot through the shield into the body, he drew the dart out and with it killed the enemy. And one asking how his wound came, he replied, By the treachery of my shield. As he was leading forth his army, he wrote to the Ephors, I will accomplish what I wish in this war, or I will die for it. Being killed as he fought to free the Greeks in Thrace, the ambassadors that were sent to Sparta to condole his loss made a visit to his mother Argileonis. And the first question she asked was, whether Brasidas died bravely. And the Thracians extolling him and saying there was no such man in the world; You mistake, sir, said she, it is true, Brasidas was a good man, but Sparta can show many who are better.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 22 contents Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 24 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Brasidas — a life Ephors — a candidate entry

Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch — translated by unknown (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)