Page:History of Greece Vol IX.djvu/100

 JS HISTORY OF GREECE. ing ; at day -break tLe enemy will be on us, and we stall be put t death with tortures. Not a man is stirring to take measures of de fence. Why do I wait for any man older than myself, or for any man of a different city, to begin ?" With these reflections, interesting in themselves and given with Homeric vivacity, he instantly went to convene the lochagi or cap- tains who had served under his late friend Proxenus ; and im- pressed upon them emphatically the necessity of standing forward to put the army in a posture of defence. " I cannot sleep, gentle- men ; neither, I presume, can you, under our present perils. The enemy will be upon us at day-break, prepared to kill us all with tortures, as his worst enemies. For my part, I rejoice that his flagitious perjury has put an end to a truce by which we were the great losers ; a truce under which we, mindful of our oaths, have passed through all the rich possessions of the Icing, without touching anything except what we could purchase with our own scanty means. Now, we have our hands free ; all these rich spoils stand between us and him, as prizes for the better man. The gods, who preside over the match, will assuredly be on the side of us, who have kept our oaths in spite of strong temptations, against these perjurers. Moreover, our bodies are more enduring, and our Bpirits more gallant, than theirs. They are easier to wound, and easier to kill, than we are, under the same favor of the gods as we experienced at Kunaxa. " Probably others also are feeling just as we feel. But let us not wait for any one else to come as monitors to us ; let us take the lead, and communicate the stimulus of honor to others. Do you show yourselves now the best among the lochages, more worthy of being generals than the generals themselves. Begin at once, i TUV ffVfif3uvTuv fiETu TO ovap. TiyVErai yap rude. EvdiJf t^etd}/ u.viyi?- Qri, irp&Tov fiev kvvoia avTti tfimirrei Tt mriuttifiat ; q 6e vvt; irpo/Baiver apa 6e TTJ fjfj.epp eiKbf roi)f TroAe/ziODf fj&tv, etc. The reader of Homer will readily recall various passages in the Iliad and Odyssey, wherein the like mental talk is put into language and expanded, such as Iliad, xi, 403 and several other passages cited or referred to in Colonel Mure's History of the Language and Literature of Greece, ch. xiv, tol. ii, p. 25 seq. A vision of light shining brightly out of a friendly house, counts for a fkvorable aign (Plutarch, De Genio Socratis, p. 587 C.)-