History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Thucydides, Vol. 1-4. Smith, Charles Foster, translator. London and Cambridge, MA: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1919-1923.

However this may be, those who then received the name of Hellenes, whether severally and in succession, city by city, according as they understood one another's speech, or in a body at a later time, engaged together in no enterprise before the Trojan war, on account of weakness and lack of intercourse with one another. And they united even for this expedition only when they were now making considerable use of the sea.