101
On these verses, gentlemen, your fathers were brought up. All women are by nature fond of children, but this one Euripides portrayed as loving her country more than her offspring and made it clear that, if women bring themselves to act like this, men should show towards their country a devotion which cannot be surpassed, not forsake it and flee, as Leocrates did, nor disgrace it before the whole of Greece.
102
I want also to recommend Homer to you. In your fathers’ eyes he was a poet of such worth that they passed a law that every four years at the Panathenaea he alone of all the poets should have his works recitedThe law that Homer should be recited at the festival of the Great Panathenaea, held in the third year of each Olympiad, may fairly safely be assigned to the time of the Pisistratids (c. 560 to 510 B.C.). It is not mentioned in connection with Pisistratus himself, though he is credited by a number of ancient authorities with the establishment of a definite text of Homer (cf. Cicero,de Orat. 3.34), but according to Plat. Hipparch. 228b, his son Hipparchus did provide for recitations at the festival.; and thus they showed the Greeks their admiration for the noblest deeds. They were right to do so. Laws are too brief to give instruction: they merely state the things that must be done; but poets, depicting life itself, select the noblest actions and so through argument and demonstration convert men’s hearts.
103
Thus Hector, while exhorting the Trojans to defend their country, speaks these words: Fight on unresting by the ships; and if some meet their fate By wound of dart, or battling hand to hand, then let them die. To fall in combat for your country’s sake is no disgrace; For wife and child will live unharmed, and home and plot last on, If once the Achaeans leave and sail their ships to their own land. Hom. Il. 15.494
