History of the Peloponnesian War

But the Lacedaemonians themselves took heart, not only from all this, but also principally from that, that their confederates in Sicily with great power, having another navy now necessarily added to their own, would in all likelihood be with them in the beginning of the spring.

And being every way full of hopes, they purposed without delay to fall close to the war, making account, if this were well ended, both to be free hereafter from any more such dangers as the Athenians, if they had gotten Sicily, would have put them into, and also, having pulled them down, to have the principality of all Greece now secure unto themselves.