The echoes of history...................

     Nevertheless, that burden of past glory loomed over Alcibiades' age group just as the accomplishments of  the "greatest generation" of World War II do our own, especially when men like his guardian Pericles constantly harangued younger Athenians about their imperial burdens.  Spartans also fled similar apprehensions about becoming soft in comparison to their roughneck Lacedaemonian granddads who had died blocking the pass at Thermopylae.  thus, the Corinthians remonstrated with the Peloponnesians on the eve of the battle:  "It is not a just thing that all that was won through poverty should be destroyed through prosperity."

-Victor Davis Hanson,  A War Like No Other:  How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War