resort to the same popular arts in order to win over the multitude.
"This is not our way; and, besides, the moment that a man is
suspected of giving advice, however good, from corrupt motives, we
feel such a grudge against him for the gain which after all we are not
certain he will receive, that we deprive the city of its certain
benefit. Plain good advice has thus come to be no less suspected
than bad; and the advocate of the most monstrous measures is not
more obliged to use deceit to gain the people, than the best
counsellor is to lie in order to be believed. The city and the city
only, owing to these refinements, can never be served openly and
without disguise; he who does serve it openly being always suspected
of serving himself in some secret way in return. Still, considering
the magnitude of the interests involved, and the position of
affairs, we orators must make it our business to look a little farther
than you who judge offhand; especially as we, your advisers, are
responsible, while you, our audience, are not so. For if those who
gave the advice, and those who took it, suffered equally, you would
judge more calmly; as it is, you visit the disasters into which the
whim of the moment may have led you upon the single person of your
adviser, not upon yourselves, his numerous companions in error.
"However, I have not come forward either to oppose or to accuse in
the matter of Mitylene; indeed, the question before us as sensible men
is not their guilt, but our interests. Though I prove them ever so
guilty, I shall not, therefore, advise their death, unless it be
expedient; nor though they should have claims to indulgence, shall I
recommend it, unless it be dearly for the good of the country. I
consider that we are deliberating for the future more than for the
present; and where Cleon is so positive as to the useful deterrent
effects that will follow from making rebellion capital, I, who
consider the interests of the future quite as much as he, as
positively maintain the contrary. And I require you not to reject my
useful considerations for his specious ones: his speech may have the
attraction of seeming the more just in your present temper against
Mitylene; but we are not in a court of justice, but in a political
assembly; and the question is not justice, but how to make the
Mitylenians useful to Athens.
"Now of course communities have enacted the penalty of death for
many offences far lighter than this: still hope leads men to
venture, and no one ever yet put himself in peril without the inward
conviction that he would succeed in his design. Again, was there
ever city rebelling that did not believe that it possessed either in
itself or in its alliances resources adequate to the enterprise?
All, states and individuals, are alike prone to err, and there is no
law that will prevent them; or why should men have exhausted the
list of punishments in search of enactments to protect them from
evildoers? It is probable that in early times the penalties for the
greatest offences were less severe, and that, as these were
disregarded, the penalty of death has been by degrees in most cases
arrived at, which is itself disregarded in like manner. Either then
some means of terror more terrible than this must be discovered, or it
must be owned that this restraint is useless; and that as long as
poverty gives men the courage of necessity, or plenty fills them
with the ambition which belongs to insolence and pride, and the
other conditions of life remain each under the thraldom of some
fatal and master passion, so long will the impulse never be wanting to
drive men into danger. Hope also and cupidity, the one leading and the
other following, the one conceiving the attempt, the other
suggesting the facility of succeeding, cause the widest ruin, and,
although invisible agents, are far stronger than the dangers that
are seen. Fortune, too, powerfully helps the delusion and, by the
unexpected aid that she sometimes lends, tempts men to venture with
inferior means; and this is especially the case with communities,
because the stakes played for are the highest, freedom or empire, and,
when all are acting together, each man irrationally magnifies his