History of the Peloponnesian War

"As for myself, I have come here not to harm but to liberate the Hellenes, having bound the government of the Lacedaemonians by the most solemn oaths that in very truth those whom I should win as allies should enjoy their own laws; and further, we are come, not that we may have you as allies, winning you over either by force or fraud, but to offer our alliance to you who have been enslaved by the Athenians.

I claim, therefore, that I ought not either myself to be suspected, offering as I do the most solemn pledges, or to be accounted an impotent champion, but that you should boldly come over to me.

"And if anyone, possibly, being privately afraid of somebody is half-hearted through fear that I may put the city into the hands of some party or other,[*](ie. the dreaded ὀλίγοι.) let him most of all have confidence.

For I am not come to join a faction, nor do I think that the freedom I am offering would be a real one if, regardless of your ancestral institutions, I should enslave the majority to the few or the minority to the multitude.

That would be more galling than foreign rule, and for us Lacedaemonians the result would be, not thanks for our pains, but, instead of honour and glory, only reproach; and the very charges on which we are waging war to the death against the Athenians we should be found to be bringing home to ourselves in a more odious form than the power which has made no display of virtue.

For it is more shameful, at least to men of reputation, to gain advantage by specious deceit than by open force; for the one makes assault by the assertion of power, which is the gift of fortune, the other by the intrigues of deliberate injustice.