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Furthermore when we see little children trying playfully to bind their fathers’ shoes on their feet or fit their crowns upon their heads, we only laugh, but the officials in the cities, when they foolishly urge the people to imitate the deeds, ideals, and actions of their ancestors, however unsuitable they may be to the present times and conditions, stir up the common folk and, though what they do is laughable, what is done to them is no laughing matter, unless they are merely treated with utter contempt. Indeed there are many acts of the Greeks of former times by recounting which the statesman can mould and correct the characters of our contemporaries, for example, at Athens by calling to mind, not deeds in war, but such things as the decree of amnesty after the downfall of the Thirty Tyrants, the fining of Phrynichus for presenting in a tragedy the capture of Miletus, their decking their heads with garlands when Cassander refounded Thebes; how, when they heard of the clubbing at Argos, in which the Argives killed fifteen hundred of their own citizens, they decreed that an expiatory sacrifice be carried about in the assembly; and how, when they were searching the houses at the time of Harpalus’s frauds,The Thirty Tyrants at Athens were overthrown in 403 b.c.; Phrynichus presented the tragedy shortly after Miletus was captured by the Persians in 494 b.c.; Cassander refounded Thebes in 316-315 b.c., ten years after its destruction by Alexander; the clubbing of aristocrats at Argos by the mob took place in 370 b.c.; Harpalus, Alexander’s treasurer, brought to Athens in 329 b.c. funds stolen from Alexander and was supposed to have bribed many prominent Athenians, one of whom was Demosthenes. they passed by only one, that of a newly married man. By emulating acts like these it is even now possible to resemble our ancestors, but Marathon, the Eurymedon, Plataea, and all the other examples which make the common folk vainly to swell with pride and kick up their heels, should be left to the schools of the sophists.
