Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 63 — Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans

Plut. Mor., Laconic Apophthegms 63 — Laconic Apophthegms; or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch; served verbatim

Of Polydorus. Polydorus the son of Alcamenes, when one often threatened his enemies, said to him, Do not you perceive, sir, that you waste a great part of your revenge? As he marched his army against Messene, a friend asked him if he would fight against his brothers? No, said he, but I put in for an estate to which none, as yet, hath any good title. The Argives after the fight of the three hundred being totally routed in a set battle, the allies urged him not to let the opportunity slip, but storm and take the city of the enemy; for it would be very easy, now all the men were destroyed and none but women left. He replied: I love to vanquish my enemies when I fight on equal terms; nor do I think it just in him who was commissioned to contest about the confines of the two states, to desire to be master of the city; for I came only to recover our own territories and not to seize theirs. Being asked once why the Spartans ventured so bravely in battle; Because, said he, we have learned to reverence and not fear our leaders.

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

Alcamenes — 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)