History of the Peloponnesian War

"Now if you yield unto us in what we request, this coincidence on our part of need will on your part be honourable for many reasons. First, in this respect, that you lend your help to such as have suffered and not to such as have committed the injustice. And next, considering that you receive into league such as have at stake their whole fortune, you shall so place your benefit as to have a testimony of it, if ever any can be so, indelible.

Besides this, the greatest navy but your own is ours. Consider then, what rarer hap, and of greater grief to your enemies, can befall you than that that power which you would have prized above any money or other requital should come voluntarily and without all danger or cost present itself to your hands, bringing with it reputation amongst most men, a grateful mind from those you defend, and strength to yourselves. All which have not happened at once to many. And few there be of those that sue for league that come not rather to receive strength and reputation than to confer it.

If any here think that the war wherein we may do you service will not at all be, he is in an error and seeth not how the Lacedaemonians, through fear of you, are already in labour of the war; and that the Corinthians, gracious with them and enemies to you, making way for their enterprise, assault us now in the way to the invasion of you hereafter, that we may not stand amongst the rest of their common enemies, but that they may be sure beforehand either to weaken us or to strengthen their own estate.

It must therefore be your part, we offering and you accepting the league, to begin with them and to anticipate plotting rather than to counterplot against them.