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Soc. Then it is their admiration of this poet, Alcibiades, or perhaps the result of their own study, that causes the Spartans to offer a similar prayer whether the occasion be private or public—that the gods will give them for their own benefit the beautiful as well as the good: more than this no one can ever hear them pray for. The consequence is that to the present time This seems to be the meaning of the Greek, which is certainly not Platonic. In Aristot. Phys. 4.13.5 ὁ παρήκων χρόνος means past time. they have been just as fortunate as any other people; and if it has befallen them to be not invariably fortunate, it was anyhow not owing to their prayer. It rests with the gods, I conceive, to give us either what we may pray for or the reverse. And I would like to give you an account of something else, which I once heard from some of my seniors. A quarrel having arisen between the Athenians and the Spartans, it befell our city to be always unsuccessful in every battle by land and sea, and she could never win a victory. So the Athenians, in their annoyance at this result, and at a loss for some means of finding a deliverance from the trouble they were in, took counsel together and decided that the best thing they could do was to send and inquire of Ammon An Ethiopian god whose cult spread over Egypt, and through Cyrene to various parts of Greece: he had temples at Thebes and Sparta, but the famous one in the Libyan desert is probably meant here.; and moreover, to ask also for what reason the gods granted victory to the Spartans rather than to themselves: for we—such was the message—offer up to them more and finer sacrifices than any of the Greeks, and have adorned their temples with votive emblems as no other people have done, and presented to the gods the costliest and stateliest processions year by year, and spent more money thus than all the rest of the Greeks together.
