Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 28 — Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans

Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 28 — Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch; served verbatim

Of Demaratus. Demaratus, — when Orontes talked very roughly to him, and one said, Demaratus, Orontes uses you very roughly, — replied, I have no reason to be angry, for those that speak to please do the mischief, not those that talk out of malice. To one enquiring why they disgrace those that lose their shields in a battle and not those that lose their head-pieces or breastplates, he answered, Because these serve for their private safety only, but their shield for the common defence and strength of the whole army. Hearing one play upon the harp, he said, The man seems to play the fool well. In a certain assembly, when he was asked whether he held his tongue because he was a fool or for want of words, he replied, A fool cannot hold his tongue. When one asked him why being king he fled Sparta, he answered, Because the laws rule there. A Persian having by many presents enticed the boy that he loved from him, and saying, Spartan, I have caught your love; No, faith, he answered, but you have bought him. One having revolted from the king of Persia, and by Demaratus’s persuasion returning again to his obedience, and the king designing his death, Demaratus said: It is dishonorable, O king, whilst he was an enemy not to be able to punish him for his revolt, and to kill him now he is a friend. To a parasite of the king that often jeered him about his exile he said: Sir, I will not fight you, for you have lost your post in life.

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

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

Demaratus — a life Persia — 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)