History of the Peloponnesian War

"And I, seeing those now sit by and abet the same man, am fearful of them; and I do on the other side exhort the elder sort (if any of them sit near those other) not to be ashamed to deliver their minds freely, as fearing that if they gave their voice against the war they should be esteemed cowards, nor to doat (as they do) upon things absent, knowing that by passion the fewest actions and by reason the most do prosper; but rather for the benefit of their country, which is now cast into greater danger than ever before, to hold up their hands on the other side and decree that the Sicilians, within the limits they now enjoy, not misliked by you, and with liberty to sail by the shore in the Ionian gulf, and in the main of the Sicilian sea, shall possess their own and compound their differences between themselves.

And for the Egestaeans, to answer them in particular thus: that as without the Athenians they had begun the war against the Selinuntians, so they should without them likewise end it; and that we shall no more hereafter, as we have used to do, make such men our confederates, as when they do injury, we must maintain it, and when we require their assistance, cannot have it.