et way in
return. Still, considering the magnitude of the interests involved, and
the position of affairs, we orators must make it our business to look
a little farther than you who judge offhand; especially as we, your
advisers, are responsible, while you, our audience, are not so. For if
those who gave the advice, and those who took it, suffered equally, you
would judge more calmly; as it is, you visit the disasters into which
the whim of the moment may have led you upon the single person of your
adviser, not upon yourselves, his numerous companions in error.

"However, I have not come forward either to oppose or to accuse in the
matter of Mitylene; indeed, the question before us as sensible men is
not their guilt, but our interests. Though I prove them ever so guilty,
I shall not, therefore, advise their death, unless it be expedient;
nor though they should have claims to indulgence, shall I recommend it,
unless it be dearly for the good of the country. I consider that we are
deliberating for the future more than for the present; and where Cleon
is so positive as to the useful deterrent effects that will follow from
making rebellion capital, I, who consider the interests of the future
quite as much as he, as positively maintain the contrary. And I require
you not to reject my useful considerations for his specious ones: his
speech may have the attraction of seeming the more just in your present
temper against Mitylene; but we are not in a court of justice, but in a
political assembly; and the question is not justice, but how to make the
Mitylenians useful to Athens.

"Now of course communities have enacted the penalty of death for many
offences far lighter than this: still hope leads men to venture, and no
one ever yet put himself in peril without the inward conviction that he
would succeed in his design. Again, was there ever city rebelling that
did not believe that it possessed either in itself or in its alliances
resources adequate to the enterprise? All, states and individuals, are
alike prone to err, and there is no law that will prevent them; or
why should men have exhausted the list of punishments in search of
enactments to protect them from evildoers? It is probable that in early
times the penalties for the greatest offences were less severe, and
that, as these were disregarded, the penalty of death has been by
degrees in most cases arrived at, which is itself disregarded in like
manner. Either then some mea