84
Remember the reign of Codrus.The story of Codrus is told, with minor variations, by other ancient writers,e.g. by Velleius Paterculus i. 2, but the version here given by Lycurgus is the earliest extant. The Peloponnesians, whose crops had failed at home, decided to march against our city and, expelling our ancestors, to divide the land amongst themselves. They sent first to Delphi and asked the god if they were going to capture Athens, and when he replied that they would take the city so long as they did not kill Codrus, the king of the Athenians, they marched out against Athens.
85
But a Delphian Cleomantis, learning of the oracle, secretly told the Athenians. Such, it seems, was the goodwill which our ancestors always inspired even among aliens. And when the Pelopannesians invaded Attica, what did our ancestors do, gentlemen of the jury? They did not desert their country and retire as Leocrates did, nor surrender to the enemy the land that reared them and its temples. No. Though they were few in number, shut inside the walls, they endured the hardships of a siege to preserve their country.
86
And such was the nobility, gentlemen, of those kings of old that they preferred to die for the safety of their subjects rather than to purchase life by the adoption of another country. That at least is true of Codrus, who, they say, told the Athenians to note the time of his death and, taking a beggar’s clothes to deceive the enemy, slipped out by the gates and began to collect firewood in front of the town. When two men from the camp approached him and inquired about conditions in the city he killed one of them with a blow of his sickle.
