History of the Peloponnesian War

"The trustiness of your policy and intercourse amongst yourselves, Lacedaemonians, renders you the more distrustful with regard to others, if we say any thing [against them]; and from this you have a character for sober-mindedness, but betray too great ignorance with regard to foreign affairs.

For though we often forewarned you what injuries we were going to receive from the Athenians, you did not gain information respecting what we told you from time to time, but rather suspected the speakers of speaking for their own private interests. And for this reason it was not before we suffered, but when we are in the very act of suffering, that you have summoned the allies here; amongst whom we may speak with the greatest propriety, inasmuch as we have also the greatest complaints to make, being insulted by the Athenians, and neglected by you. And if they were an obscure people any where [*]( The που in the original would perhaps be most fully expressed by our colloquial phrase, in some corner or other. ) who were injuring Greece, you might have required additional warning, as not being acquainted with them;

but as it is, why need we speak at any great length, when you see that some of us are already enslaved, and that they are plotting against others, and especially against our allies, and have been for a long time prepared beforehand, in case they should ever go to war.

For they would not else have stolen Corcyra from us, and kept it in spite of us, and besieged Potidaea; of which places, the one is the most convenient for their deriving the full benefit from their possessions Thrace-ward, [*]( Arnold translates it, so as to give you the full benefit of your dominion in the neighbourhood of Thrace. But could the Lacedaemonians be said to have any such dominion, at any rate before the expedition of Brasidas? and does not the πελοποννησίοις in the next sentence seem to he put emphatically, as in opposition to the Athenian dominion just alluded to?) and the other would have supplied the largest navy to the Peloponnesians.