History of the Peloponnesian War

The Lacedaemonians governed not their confederates so as to make them tributaries but only drew them by fair means to embrace the oligarchy convenient to their own policy. But the Athenians, having with time taken into their hands the galleys of all those that stood out (except the Chians and Lesbians), reigned over them and ordained every of them to pay a certain tribute of money. By which means their own particular provision was greater in the beginning of this war than when, in their flourishing time the league between them and the rest of Greece remaining whole, it was at the most.

Such then I find to have been the state of things past, hard to be believed, though one produce proof for every particular thereof. For men receive the report of things, though of their own country if done before their own time, all alike, from one as from another, without examination.