Archidamus

for they are trying to persuade us to throw away in one brief hour the glory which our forefathers amid manifold dangers during the course of seven hundred years[*](A round number for the period between 1104 B.C., the traditional date when the sons of Heracles took Sparta, and the date of the present oration, 366 B.C.) acquired and bequeathed to us—a disaster more humiliating to Lacedaemon and more terrible than any other they could ever have devised.