History of the Peloponnesian War

Nay, one and the same design has guided them in acquiring their possessions over there and is now guiding them in their endeavour to acquire possessions here: after they had become leaders, by the free choice of their associates, both of the Ionians and of all those, descendants of the Ionians, who were members of the alliance that was concluded, avowedly, for revenge upon the Persians, they charged some with refusal to serve, others with warring upon one another, others with whatever specious charge they had at hand, and so reduced them to subjection.

And so, after all, it was not for ' freedom' that they withstood the Persians, neither the Athenians to win it for the Hellenes nor the Hellenes to win it for themselves, but they fought for the enslavement of the rest to themselves, and the Hellenes for a change of master, not to one more unwise, but more wickedly wise.

"But we are not come now, easy though it be to denounce the Athenian state, to declare before those who know already how many are its misdeeds; but much more to blame ourselves, because, though we have warning examples in the way that the Hellenes over there have been enslaved because they would not defend one another, and though the same sophisms are now practised upon us—restorings of Leontine kinsmen and succourings of Egestaean allies!—we are unwilling to combine together and with more spirit show them that here are not Ionians nor yet Hellespontines and islanders, who are always taking some new master, Persian or whoever it may be, and continue in a state of slavery, but Dorians, free men sprung from independent Peloponnesus, and now dwelling in Sicily.

Or are we waiting until we shall be taken one at a time, city by city, when we know that in this way only can we be conquered, and when we see them resorting to this policy, endeavouring to cause division among some of us by means of cunning words, to set others at war one with another by the hope of obtaining allies, and to ruin others in whatever way they can by saying something alluring to each? And do we think that, when a distant compatriot perishes before us, the same danger will not come also to ourselves, but rather that whoever before us meets with disaster merely incurs misfortune by himself alone?