History of the Peloponnesian War

After the concluding of the fifty years' peace and the league which followed, and when those ambassadors which were sent for out of the rest of Peloponnesus to accept the said peace were departed from Lacedaemon, the Corinthians (the rest going all to their own cities), turning first to Argos, entered into treaty with some of the Argive magistrates to this purpose:

that the Lacedaemonians having made a peace and league with the Athenians, their hitherto mortal enemies, tending not to the benefit, but to the enslaving of Peloponnesus, it behoved them to consider of a course for the safety of the same, and to make a decree that any city of the Grecians that would, and were a free city, and admitted the like and equal trials of judgment with theirs, might make a league with the Argives for the one mutually to aid the other; and to assign them a few men, with absolute authority from the state, to treat with; and that it should not be motioned to the people, to the end that, if the multitude would not agree to it, it might be unknown that ever they had made such a motion; affirming that many would come into this confederacy upon hatred to the Lacedaemonians.

And the Corinthians, when they had made this overture, went home.