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The cause of this is that nothing of either good or of evil visits mankind unmixed, but that riches and power are attended and followed by folly, and folly in turn by licence;See General Introduction p. xxxiii. whereas poverty and lowliness are attended by sobriety and great moderation;
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so that it is hard to decide which of these lots one should prefer to bequeath to one’s own children. For we shall find that from a lot which seems to be inferior men’s fortunes generally advance to a better condition,Cf. Isoc. 6.103 ff. whereas from one which appears to be superior they are wont to change to a worse.
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Of this truth I might cite examples without number from the lives of individual men, since these are subject to the most frequent vicissitudes; but instances which are more important and better known to my hearers may be drawn from the experiences of our city and of the Lacedaemonians. As for the Athenians, after our city had been laid waste by the barbarians, we became, because we were anxious about the future and gave attention to our affairs, the foremost of the Hellenes;Athens, then a walled city, was temporarily abandoned by her people before the battle of Salamis, and destroyed by the troops of Xerxes. After the Persian Wars, she became the head of the Confederacy of Delos. See Isoc. 6.42 ff., and Isoc. 4.71-72. whereas, when we imagined that our power was invincible, we barely escaped being enslaved.At the end of the Peloponnesian War, Athens was at the mercy of Sparta and the Spartan allies. The latter proposed that Athens be utterly destroyed and her citizens sold into slavery, but the Spartans refused to allow the city “which had done a great service to Hellas” to be reduced to slavery. Xen. Hell. 2.2.19-20. Cf. Isoc. 8.78, 105; Isoc. 14.32; Isoc. 15.319.
