Laudator Temporis Acti

Aristotle, Politics 7.11.8-12 (1330^b31-1331^a18; tr. C.D.C. Reeve, with his notes):

Some people say⁵⁴ that city-states that lay claim to virtue should not have walls. But this is a very old-fashioned notion. Especially when it is plain to see that city-states that pride themselves on not having walls are refuted by the facts.⁵⁵ It may not be noble to seek safety behind fortified walls against an evenly matched or only slightly more numerous foe, but it can and does happen that the superior numbers of the attackers are too much for human virtue⁵⁶ or the virtue of a small number of people. Hence if the city-state is to survive without suffering harm or arrogant treatment, it should be left to military expertise to determine what the most secure kind of fortified walls are for it to have, particularly now that the invention of projectiles and siege engines⁵⁷ has reached such a high degree of precision. To claim that city-states should not have surrounding walls is like flattening the mountains and trying to make the territory easy to invade, or like not having walls for private houses, on the grounds that they make the inhabitants cowardly. Furthermore, we should not forget that the inhabitants of a city-state with surrounding walls can treat it either as having walls or as not having them, whereas the inhabitants of a city-state without walls lack this option. Given that this is how things stand, a city-state not only should have surrounding walls, it should take care to ensure that they both enhance the beauty of the city-state and satisfy military requirements, especially those brought to light by recent discoveries. For just as attackers are always busily concerned with new ways to get the better of city-states, so too, though some defensive devices have already been discovered, defenders should keep searching for and thinking out new ones. For when people are well prepared in the first place, no one even thinks of attacking them.

54. See Plato, Laws 778d-779b. The virtue in question is primarily courage (see 1331^a6).

55. Probably an allusion to Sparta, which prided itself on having no walls, and suffered humiliating defeat in 369, when it was invaded by the Theban Epaminondas (1269^b37).

56. The level of nonheroic virtue achievable by most humans (1295^a25-31).

57. Catapults, siege towers, and battering rams had all been fairly recently introduced.

See Josiah Ober, Fortress Attica: Defense of the Athenian Land Frontier 404-322 B.C. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), pp. 83-84.