Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 1.djvu/63

 PERICLES lamentation, not for the houses and land, but for the lives [that are lost]: for it is not these things that gain men, but men that gain these things. And if I thought that I should persuade you, I would bid you go out yourselves and ravage them, and show the Peloponnesians that you will not submit to them for these things, at any rate.

I have also many other grounds for hoping that we shall conquer, if you will avoid gaining additional dominion at the time of your being engaged in the war, and bringing on yourselves dangers of your own choosing; for I am more afraid of our own mistakes than of the enemy's plans. But those points shall be explained in another speech at the time of the events. At the present time let us send these men away with this answer: that with regard to the Megareans, we will also allow them to use our ports and market, if the Lacedæmonians also abstain from expelling foreigners, whether ourselves or our allies (for it forbids neither the one nor the other in the treaty): with regard to the states, that we will leave them independent, if we also held them as independent when we made the treaty; and when they too restore to the states a permission to be independent suitably to the interests, not of the Lacedæmonians themselves, but of the several states, as they wish: that we are willing to submit to judicial decision, according to the treaty: and that we will not commence hostilities, but will defend ourselves against those who do. For this is both a right answer and a 15