their hatreds is ridiculous. For
neither did the difference between the Aeginetans and the Athenians, nor
that between the Chalcidians and the Eretrians, nor yet that between the
Corinthians and the Megarians, hinder them from fighting together for
Greece. Nor did the Macedonians, their most bitter enemies, turn the
Thessalians from their friendship with the barbarians, by joining
the Persian party themselves. For the common danger did so bury their
private grudges, that banishing their other passions, they applied their
minds either to honesty for the sake of virtue, or to profit through the
impulse of necessity. And indeed, after that necessity which compelled
them to obey the Persians was over, they returned again to the Greeks,
as Lacrates the Spartan has openly testified of them. And Herodotus, as
constrained to it, in his relation of the affairs at Plataea, confessed
that the Phocians took part with the Greeks. (Herodotus, ix. 31.)

Neither ought it to seem strange to any, if he thus bitterly inveighs
against the unfortunate; since he reckons amongst enemies and traitors
those who were present at the engagement, and together with the other
Greeks hazarded their safety. For the Naxians, says he, sent three
ships to the assistance of the barbarians; but Democritus, one of their
captains, persuaded the others to take the party of the Greeks. (Ibid.
viii. 46.) So unable he is to praise without dispraising, that if he
commends one man he must condemn a whole city or people. But in
this there give testimony against him, of the more ancient writers
Hellanicus, and of the later Ephorus, one of which says that the Naxians
came with six ships to aid the Greeks, and the other with five. And
Herodotus convinces himself of having feigned these things. For the
writers of the Naxian annals say, that they had before beaten back
Megabates, who came to their island with two hundred ships, and after
that had put to flight the general Datis who had set their city on fire.
Now if, as Herodotus has elsewhere said, the barbarians burned their
city so that the men were glad to save themselves by flying into the
mountains, had they not just cause rather to send aid to the destroyers
of their country than to help the protectors of the common liberty?
But that he framed this lie not so much to honor Democritus, as to cast
infamy on the Naxians, is manifest from his omitting and wholly passing
over in silence the valiant acts then performed