this, it would seem to me more spirited[1] to imitate those persons who, while living and breathing, entertain themselves about the order and honourableness of their burial, and who take pleasure in seeing in marble their dead features. Happy they who can rejoice and gratify their minds by insensibility, and live in their death!
(c) I am almost moved to irreconcilable hatred against every sort of popular domination, although it seems the most natural and equitable, when I remember the inhuman injustice of the Athenian people in putting to death without mercy, and refusing even to hear in their own defence, the gallant officers who had just beaten the Lacedæmonians in the naval battle near the Arginusæ Islands, — the most hotly contested and the hardest battle that the Greeks ever fought on the sea, — because they [the officers] had followed up such opportunities as the laws of war offered them rather than stay to collect and bury their dead. And the behaviour of Diomedon makes this punishment the more odious: he was one of the condemned — a man of noteworthy excellence both military and political; he, coming forward to speak after having heard the decree of condemnation, and finding only then an opportunity to be heard without interruption, instead of taking advantage of it to the profit of his own cause and to lay bare the patent iniquity of so barbarous a judgement, expressed only solicitude for the salvation of his judges, beseeching the gods to turn that judgement to their advantage; and lest, by the non-performance of the vows that he and his companions had made in gratitude for their eminent good-fortune, they[2] might draw down upon themselves the wrath of the gods, he told them what those vows were; and without other words, and without discussion, he went boldly to his doom.[3] Some years later fortune punished them with a taste of the same sauce;[4] for Chabrias, the captain-general of their naval force, having had the upper hand in the battle against Pollis, the Spartan admiral, off the island of Naxos, lost the whole fruit,
