Plut. Mor., Laws and Customs of the Lacedaemonians 34 — The Account of the Laws and Customs of the Lacedaemonians

Plut. Mor., Laws and Customs of the Lacedaemonians 34 — The Account of the Laws and Customs of the Lacedaemonians, Plutarch; served verbatim

And therefore it was, that when they heard of Archilochus's arrival at Sparta (though a Lacedaemonian, and of an excellent wit), yet they presently commanded him to depart the city, having understood how that in a poem of his he had affirmed it was greater wisdom for a man to throw his arms away and secure himself by flight, than to stand to his own defence with the hazard of his life, or therein to die valiantly in the field. His words were after this manner : — Let who will boast their courage in the field, I find but little safety from my shield. Nature's not Honor's laws we must obey ; This made me cast my useless shield away, And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life, which valor could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain. But who can get another life again 1 *

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

Archilochus — a life

The Account of the Laws and Customs of the Lacedaemonians, Plutarch — translated by John Pulleyn (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)