The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [161]
7. ‘For do not hope that the Persian, when he has conquered our country, will be content and not advance against you next.
8. ‘Take your measures beforehand, and consider that you defend yourself when you aid us.’
9. Gelo replied, ‘You have the face to ask this when you refused to aid me against the Carthaginians.
10. ‘Now that I am powerful, however, you come to me! But I will not treat you as you treated me.
11. ‘I am ready to help, and to furnish as my contribution two hundred triremes, twenty thousand soldiers, two thousand cavalry, and an equal number of archers, slingers and light horsemen,
12. ‘Together with corn for the whole Grecian army as long as the war lasts.
13. ‘These services, however, I promise on one condition – that you appoint me commander of all the Grecian forces during the war with the barbarian.
14. ‘Unless you agree to this, I will neither send aid, nor come myself.’
15. To this neither the Spartans could agree as regards the land forces, nor the Athenians as regards the sea forces.
16. The envoys said, ‘We came here in search of an army, not a general! The Spartans are undisputed for their excellence at arms,
17. ‘And the Athenians, the most ancient nation in Greece, the only Greeks who have never changed their abode,
18. ‘The people who are said by the poet Homer to have sent to Troy the man best able of all the Greeks to array and marshal an army – may be allowed to boast somewhat of themselves.’
19. Gelo replied: ‘Strangers, you have, it seems to me, no lack of commanders, but you are likely to lack men to receive their orders.
20. ‘As you are resolved to yield nothing and claim everything, you had best make haste back to Greece, and say that the best hope of succour has been lost to her.’
21. Nevertheless Gelo anxiously kept watch on matters in Greece, to see how affairs stood;
22. And was ready to send earth and water to Xerxes if, as he feared would indeed happen, the Greeks were overcome.
Chapter 64
1. As for the Corcyraeans, whom the envoys visited on their way to Sicily, and gave the same message as to Gelo,
2. They readily promised their help, declaring that the ruin of Greece was a thing which they could not tamely stand by to see;
3. For should she fall, they themselves must submit to slavery the very next day; so they were bound to help to the uttermost of their power.
4. But though they answered so smoothly, when the time came for their aid to be sent, they were of quite a different mind.
5. They manned sixty ships, but it was long before they put to sea with them;
6. And when they had so done, they went no further than the Peloponnese, where they lay to with their fleet off the Lacedaemonian coast, about Pylos and Taenarum;
7. Like Gelo, watching to see what turn the war would take. For they did not believe the Greeks could win, and expected that the Persians would become master of the whole of Greece.
8. They acted as they did in order that they might be able to say to Xerxes: ‘O king! though the Greeks sought to obtain our aid in their war with you,
9. ‘And though we had a force of no small size, and could have furnished a greater number of ships than any Greek state except Athens,
10. ‘Yet we refused, since we would not fight against you, nor do anything to cause you annoyance.’
11. The Corcyraeans hoped that a speech like this would gain them better treatment from the Persians than the rest of the Greeks.
12. At the same time, they had an excuse ready to give their countrymen, which they used when the time came;
13. For when reproached, they replied that they had fitted out a fleet of sixty triremes, but the Etesian winds did not allow them to double Cape Malea,
14. And this hindered them from reaching Salamis – it was not from any bad motive that they missed the sea fight.
15. The Thessalians, however, did not submit to Persia until they were forced to do so; they gave plain proof that they preferred to ally with their fellow-Greeks.
16. No sooner did they