Read The English Works of Thomas Hobbes (1839) 2 vols. - Vol. 8 Online
Authors: Thucydides
[“Howsoever: and at any rate, with an army to pass c., is a thing that all Grecians” c.]
[“Arbitrary rather than constitutional”. Goeller.]
[“And here the Thessalian guides left him”.]
[“Into Chalcidicé”. Chalcis in Eubœa was, in the middle of the eighth century and long afterwards, under the government of great landowners (ὁι ἱπποβόται, Herod. v. 77), who had perhaps political motives for encouraging the poorer citizens to emigrate. About that time it planted, amongst numerous other colonies, several in the peninsula in the Ægean sea, which hence acquired the name of
Chalcidicé.
It was also called (including the coast as far as Amphipolis) τὰ ἐπὶ Θρᾴκης: which is by Hobbes generally rendered
Thrace,
though forming no part of it.]
[“And at the same time the cities adjacent to them (the Chalcideans), which had not revolted, secretly drew them on”. This should be in a parenthesis.]
[“Should separate themselves from the rest, in order to be made free”.—The helots are commonly supposed to have been the Achæan inhabitants of the town of Helos, reduced to bondage after an unsuccessful insurrection against the Dorians: though according to one derivation of the name, from ἕλω (like δμῶες from δαμάω) they were
captives
taken in war, and are supposed by Mueller (iii. 3.) to have been found in that state by the Dorians on first entering Peloponnesus. The name was applied to the Messenians as well as the Laconians. They were bound to the soil, and in a certain sense the slaves of the state. Upon the fixed rent (82 medimni of barley, and oil and wine in proportion) paid for every κλῆρος or lot of land cultivated by them, the Spartan, occupied only with war and the gymnasium, was entirely dependent for that leisure which was the essential condition of his status. Their usual treatment appears to have been intended to make the distinction between freeman and slave as broad and deeply felt as possible. Every thing Spartan was polluted by the touch of a helot: he dared not be heard singing a Spartan song, nor be seen in any but the rustic garb, the livery of his servitude. For thinning their numbers, which must have been ten times greater than those of the Spartans, one expedient was the κρυπτεία: an institution different perhaps in its origin, but one which became a secret commission for removing the more dangerous of the slaves. The Spartan youth were sent abroad armed with daggers, not merely for defence or to inure them to the hardships of a military life. A usage somewhat similar, but without affectation of secrecy, is said to have been established in Attica. Emancipation was not unfrequent: and there were many degrees of freedom between the helot and the Spartan (see v. 34). A little below is seen the first experiment of fully arming helots in the service of the state: the success of which encouraged the repetition of it in cases, like the present, of distant foreign expeditions. Thus 300 neodamodes will be found serving under Gylippus in Sicily: and in 399, Thimbron had 1000 with him in Asia. The 700 here spoken of, go hereafter by the name of Brasideians. The helots must somehow have been made to forget the fate of their 2,000 fellows: since Sparta when hard pressed after the battle of Leuctra, with the Thebans all but in the city, armed and promised liberty to 6000 helots, and was faithfully served by them.]
[“Brasidas was sent off by the Lacedæmonians, both himself most desirous of going, and much desired by the Chalcideans: a man that had then a reputation at Sparta of being active in every thing, and after he went on this expedition one that was most serviceable to the Lacedæmonians”.]
[“And also a diversion of the war from Peloponnesus. And in the war after the Sicilian affair, the virtue” c.]
[“And had a watchful eye upon their allies there”.]
[“To the pass of Lyncus”: the name of the district, not of any one city, there being here in early times only unfortified villages. It was surrounded on all sides by mountains, this narrow pass between two heights being the chief road to the coast (see ch. 127). It was traversed by the Egnatian Roman road: which starting from Dyrrhacium and crossing the Illyrian mountains at Pylon,
the gateway,
led through the country of the Lyncestæ and Eordians to Edessa and Pella. Mueller.]
[“Not to remove all dangers out of the way of Perdiccas”. Vulgo ὑπεξελθεῖν. Bekker c. ὑπεξελεῖν.]
[“Not uneloquent
for
a Lacedæmonian”.]
[“A false liberty”.]
[“If they invade you”.]
[A corrupt sentence.]
[“Into the hands of
certain men,
let him above all have confidence”.]
[“Not thanks for our labour, but accusation rather than honour and glory: and the charges on pretence of which we are now warring against the Athenians, we should appear to be ourselves liable to in a more odious degree, than one that never pretended virtue”.]
[“So great is our circumspection in matters which concern us in the highest degree. And besides the oaths we have sworn already, the greatest” c.]
[“Lest, if you be not forced to join them, they be injured by this your good will towards them, whilst contributing your money to the Athenians”.]
[“
The
most honourable title”.]
[“Was
denounced
”.]
[ἄμπελον: “the vines”: making fascines, to hold the earth together. Goeller.—“And the stones and bricks of the buildings near, pulling them down for that purpose”.—“And in such places c., and where the building of the temple no longer stood, (for the stoa had fallen down), erected wooden towers”.]
[“Pagondas, being with Arianthidas
bœotarch
of Thebes, and the command being his, was of opinion” c. Whether the relative οἵ, “
who
are eleven”, refers to the “bœotarchs”, or to “the rest” of them, that is, whether their whole number was
eleven
or thirteen, is a disputed point. See v. 38, note.]
[“Your
hereditary
custom”.]
[“When
besides
they be” c.]
[“And (how should we not) know, that though others fight c., we, if worsted, shall have one indisputable boundary fixed for our whole territory? For they will enter and hold all we have by force”.]
[See i. 108, 113: iii. 68, note.]
[See vi. 69, note.]
[“Breaking up his camp”.]
[“Where they piled their arms”: see ii. 2, note.]
[The ξύμμοροι stood in the same relation to Thebes, that Chæroneia did to Orchomenus: see ch. 76, n.]
[Copais: the lake whereon stood the
Athens
said to have been founded by Cecrops, and to have been swallowed up by a flood.]
[In the battle of Leuctra, the Thebans formed their column fifty deep: the Syracusans, in their first battle with the Athenians, sixteen deep; the ordinary depth of the Macedonian phalanx. When the Romans used the same tactics, their phalanx, consisting of four different descriptions of soldiers drawn from the four highest classes, seems to have been drawn up twenty deep, and perhaps more. On the contrary, the Lacedæmonians and Athenians generally formed their line only eight deep, in the Peloponnesian war; though at Leuctra the Lacedæmonians adopted a deeper order of battle. The causes of this difference are probably to be found in the circumstance, that the phalanx at Athens and Sparta was formed entirely of citizens of the same class and similarly armed: whereas in Bœotia and Macedonia, as at Rome, it contained a large admixture of poorer citizens, who being unable to furnish themselves as heavy–armed soldiers, were less fitted for the front line; and were therefore stationed in the rear of their better armed comrades, to add weight to their charge by the mere force of numbers. Arnold.]
[“
Regular
light–armed”. Göll.]
[“Being far more numerous than those of the enemy”, followed c.]
[“The Bœotians, when Pagondas had there given them too a short exhortation, sang the pæan and charged down the hill”. Bekker c., παιωνίσαντες: vulgo παιωνίσαντος.]
[“
And
they met” c.]
[“Bearing each other down with their shields”.]
[“And in this part they fell especially upon the Thespians. For deserted by those on their flanks, and surrounded and crowded together, those Thespians that” c.]
[“And forcing them back, pursued them at first for a short space. And Pagondas seeing the distress of his left wing, and sending two c., it came to pass that that wing of the Athenians which was victorious, thinking c., was put into affright: and on
both
wings now, one under this mistake and the other overpowered and broken by the Thebans, the flight became general of the Athenian army”.]
[“Save only for holy water at the sacrifices”. The modern custom of sprinkling with holy water seems to be borrowed from the ancients. The priest used to dip a brand in it, and therewith sprinkle and sanctify the congregation.]
[“Now use them as their own.”]
[“Than they that will not barter dead bodies for things sacred to the gods: and they bade the Bœotians to tell them plainly to gather up their dead, not on terms of leaving the Bœotian territory; (for in it they were not, but in that they had made their own by the sword); but under truce according to the custom of their ancestors”.]
[“
Their
(the Bœotians’) ground”. Oropus is placed by some amongst the fourteen confederate states of Bœotia, in respect of which every sixty years, at the festival of Dædala, fourteen wooden images were carried up to the top of Cithæron. It was the subject of many contests between Thebes and Athens, but in the end became part of the territory of Attica. To Athens it was of vast importance, not only for the fertility of its territory, but as commanding the passage to Eubœa, which was in some measure indispensable to her subsistence.]
[“And the herald, knowing nothing of it, coming again” c. The moral effects of this battle are described by Xenophon (Mem. iii. 5.) as most disastrous for the Athenians. So much were they depressed and their enemy elated, that whereas heretofore the Thebans did not consider themselves, even on their own ground, a match for the Athenians without the aid of the Peloponnesians, the Athenians now did not feel even Attica secure from invasion by the Thebans. Other fruits of it will be seen in the expedition of Brasidas to Chalcidice.]
[“Demosthenes
too
”.—“Sitalkes
too
died”: the ally of the Athenians. An enumeration of their various mishaps at this time.]
[“
The
colony”.]
[“To colonize”.—“Sent thither, both of themselves and such as volunteered, ten thousand settlers”. Amphipolis was important to Athens on account of its wealth and magnitude, but more so as commanding the only passage by which a hostile army from the south could reach the towns and gold mines on the Thracian coast, a main source of her revenue. Thirlwall.]
[“And they carried on the war from Eion, which they used as a place of traffic at the mouth of the river by the sea–side, five–and–twenty stadia from the city, which Hagnon named Amphipolis: because, being washed by the Strymon on two sides, to surround it entirely he enclosed it with a long wall from one bend of the river to the other, and made it conspicuous on all sides, both to the sea and the continent”.]
[“But above all the Argilians, being c., as soon as opportunity offered and Brasidas arrived,
they
having been practising long before with those of their own party there to betray the city, now receiving him into it and revolting” c. Bekker c. ἔπραξάν: vulgo ἔπραξέν.]
[“The town is at some distance from the bridge: and there were not then walls, as there are now”. That is, from the town to the bridge.]
[“Of the outlying property of the Amphipolitans, whose dwellings were all about the place”.]
[“Being taken”.]
[“Nothing passed from those within, as he expected” c.]
[That is, Amphipolitan and Athenian, all alike.]
[“To be not what it was (before the offer of Brasidas) c.: and the rest c., as being
unexpectedly
delivered c., and not deprived (as they were before Brasidas’ offer) of the rights of citizenship”. Goeller.]
[“But began settling the affairs of Amphipolis”.]
[“To make their
first
trial of the Lacedæmonians, who were very earnest in the matter”.]
[That is, the envy
felt
by the πρῶτοι ἄνδρες. See v. 15, note.]
[See chapter 69, note.]
[“A prominence projecting from the king’s ditch into the Ægæan sea, where it is bounded by Athos, a high mountain upon it”. This canal of Xerxes is stated in Walpole’s Memoirs (1818), to be yet clearly traceable, though filled with mud and weeds: and to be in length about a mile and a quarter, and in breadth about twenty–five yards.]