History of the Peloponnesian War

"But, open as the Athenian state is to accusation, we are not come at the present time to prove before those who know this already, in how many respects it is committing injustice; but much rather to censure ourselves, because, with the warnings given us by the Greeks in those quarters, how they were enslaved through not assisting one another, and with the same sophisms being now practised on ourselves— their re-instatements of their Leontine kinsmen, and succours to their Segestan allies—we will not unite together, and show them that the people here are no Ionians, or Hellespontines and islanders, who are always passing to a new master, either the Mede or some one else, and still kept in slavery, but free Dorians from the independent Peloponnese now living in Sicily.

Or do we wait till we have separately been subdued, city by city? knowing, as we do, that in this way only are we vincible; and seeing them having recourse to this method, so as to set some of us at variance by words; to set others at war through hope of finding allies; and to injure others by saying something flattering to them, as they severally can And do we then think, that if our distant fellow countryman is destroyed before us, the danger will not come to each of ourselves also, but that he who suffers before us keeps his misfortune to himself?