After this they joined battle, the Argives and their allies advancing with haste and fury, the Lacedaemonians slowly and to the music of many flute-players—a standing institution in their army, that has nothing to do with religion, but is meant to make them advance evenly, stepping in time, without breaking their order, as large armies are apt to do in the moment of engaging.
The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.
History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides — translated by Richard Crawley, 1874
Perseus Digital Library — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Richard Crawley translation) · Richard Crawley (1874); J. M. Dent / E. P. Dutton edition (1910); Perseus Project digital edition
license: public-domain (the Crawley translation — Crawley 1840-1893, per the shelf copy's own bibliographical note; the digitized Dent/Dutton edition is pre-1930); Perseus digital edition CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern