Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/392

 384 ARATUS. yet lie anJ they came off safe, then he would give eaiih of them a house and a talent. Now the threescore talents being to be deposited in the hands of ^gias for Erginus and his partners, and Aratus neither having so much by him, nor willing, by borrowing it from others, to give any one a susjiicion of his design, he pawned his plate and his wife's golden ornaments to iEgias for the money. For so high was his temper, and so strong his passion for noble actions, that, even as he had heard that Phocion and Epaminondas were the best and justest of the Greeks, because they refused the greatest presents and would not surrender their duty for money, so he now chose to be at the expense of this enterprise privately, and to advance all the cost out of his own property, taking the whole hazard on himself for the sake of the rest that did not so much as know what was doing. And who indeed can withhold, even now, his admiration for and his sympathy with the generous mind of one, who paid so largely to purchase so great a risk, and lent out his richest possessions to have an opportunity to expose his own life, by entering among his enemies in the dead of the night, without desiring any other security for them than the hope of a noble success. Now the enterprise, though dangerous enough in itself, was made much more so by an error happening through mistake in the very beginning. For Technon, one of Aratus's servants, was sent away to Diodes, that they might together view' the wall. Now he had never seen .Diodes, but made no question of knowing him by the marks Erginus had given him of him ; namely, that he had curly hair, a swarthy complexion, and no beard. Being come, therefore, to the appointed place, he stayed waiting for Erginus and Diodes outside the town, in front of the place called Ornis. In the mean