For the People of Megalopolis

But I shall get no answer. Yet you all know that, whether these speakers advise it or not, you are bound to help the Messenians, both for the sake of your sworn agreement with them and for the advantage that you derive from the preservation of their city. Just ask yourselves at what point you would begin to make your stand against Lacedaemonian injustice with more honor and generosity—with the defence of Megalopolis or with the defence of Messene.

In the one case, you will show yourselves ready to help the Arcadians and eager to confirm the peace for which you faced danger on the field of battle. In the other case, everyone will see clearly that you wish to preserve Messene less for the sake of justice than for fear of the Lacedaemonians. But the proper course is in all things to find out what is right and then do it, though at the same time we must take care that what we do is expedient as well.

Now my opponents argue that the recovery of Oropus is something that we ought to attempt, but that if we make enemies of those who would have helped us to recover it, we shall have no allies. I too think that we ought to recover Oropus, but to say that the Lacedaemonians will be our enemies as soon as we make allies of those Arcadians who are willing to be our friends—I think the only men who have no right even to suggest that are the men who persuaded you to help the Lacedaemonians in their hour of danger.

For when all the Peloponnesians came to you and called on you to lead them against the Lacedaemonians, it was not by such arguments that these men persuaded you not to receive them—(and that was why they took the only remaining course of applying to the Thebans)—but to contribute funds and risk your lives for the safety of the Lacedaemonians. Yet you would surely never have consented to save them, if they had announced to you that when saved they would owe you no thanks for your help, unless you allowed them as before to commit whatever act of injustice they chose.

Moreover, even if our alliance with the Arcadians is a serious impediment to the designs of the Lacedaemonians, yet surely they ought to be more grateful for the safety that we won for them, when they were in the gravest peril, than angry because of the wrongs that they are now prevented from committing. How, then, can they refuse to help us at Oropus without proving themselves the basest of mankind? By heavens! I see no escape for them.

Then there is another argument that astonishes me; that if we make an alliance with the Arcadians and act upon it, our city will seem to be changing its policy and breaking faith. For to me, men of Athens, the exact opposite seems to be the case. How so? Because I do not think any one man would deny that Athens has saved the Lacedaemonians, and the Thebans before them, and the Euboeans recently,[*](The references are to the battle of Mantinea (362), the alliance with Thebes against Sparta in 378, and the deliverance of Euboea from the Thebans in 357.) and has afterwards made alliance with them, having always one and the same object in view.

And what is that? To save the victims of injustice. If, then, this is so, it is not we who are inconsistent, but those who refuse to abide by the principles of justice; and it will be manifest that the circumstances are always changing, through the policy of ambitious men, but our city changes not.

The policy of the Lacedaemonians seems to me to be very sharp practice. For they now say that Elis ought to receive parts of Triphylia, and Phlius the district of Tricaranum, and certain Arcadian tribes the land belonging to them, and that we ought to have Oropus, not because they want to see each of us enjoying our own, far from it—(that would be a tardy exhibition of philanthropy).