68
Nothing angers me so much, gentlemen, as to hear some person among his supporters saying that to have left the city is not treason, since your ancestors once left it when they crossed to Salamis during their war with Xerxes: a critic so senseless and contemptuous of you that he has presumed to confuse the most honorable action with the most base.
69
For where have men not proclaimed the valor of those heroes? Who is so grudging, who so completely without spirit, that he would not wish to have shared in their exploits? They did not desert Athens; they simply changed the scene, making an honorable decision in the face of the growing menace.
70
Eteonicus the Spartan, Adimantus the Corinthian and the Aeginetan fleet intended, under cover of night, to seek safety for themselves.There are at least two mistakes in this account. (1) The Spartan general was Eurybiadas. (2) The Aeginetans supported the Athenians’ policy, since a withdrawal to the isthmus of Corinth would have entailed the surrender of their island. See Hdt. 8.74. Even the Athenian claim that Adimantus wished, or as Herodotus (Hdt. 8.94) records it, actually attempted, to flee is now regarded as a misrepresentation of the fact that the Corinthians were dispatched before the battle to oppose the Egyptian ships which had blocked the western end of the bay. Our ancestors, though they were being deserted by all the Greeks, forcibly liberated themselves and the others too by making them assist at Salamis in the naval battle against the Persians, and so triumphed unaided over both enemy and ally, in a way appropriate to each, conferring a favor upon one and defeating the other in battle. A fit comparison indeed to make with the man who escapes from his country on a four days’ voyage to Rhodes!
