ἱστορίαι Historiai
Thuc. 6.76 History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides; served verbatim
‘Camarinaeans, we did not come on this embassy because we were afraid of your being frightened by the actual forces of the Athenians, but rather of your being gained by what they would say to you before you heard anything from us. They are come to Sicily with the pretext that you know, and the intention which we all suspect, in my opinion less to restore the Leontines to their homes than to oust us from ours; as it is out of all reason that they should restore in Sicily the cities that they lay waste in Hellas, or should cherish the Leontine Chalcidians because of their Ionian blood, and keep in servitude the Euboean Chalcidians, of whom the Leontines are a colony. No; but the same policy which has proved so successful in Hellas is now being tried in Sicily. After being chosen as the leaders of the Ionians and of the other allies of Athenian origin, to punish the Mede, the Athenians accused some of failure in military service, some of fighting against each other, and others, as the case might be, upon any colourable pretext that could be found, until they thus subdued them all. In fine, in the struggle against the Medes, the Athenians did not fight for the liberty of the Hellenes, or the Hellenes for their own liberty, but the former to make their countrymen serve them instead of him, the latter to change one master for another, wiser indeed than the first, but wiser for evil.

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
Mede — a candidate entry

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