This text is part of:
75.
"Therefore, men of Lacedaemon, we deserve not so great envy of the Grecians, for our courage at that time and for our prudence and for the dominion we hold, as we now undergo.
[2]
Which dominion we obtained not by violence, but because the confederates, when yourselves would not stay out the relics of the war against the barbarian, came in and entreated us to take the command of their own accord.
[3]
So that at first we were forced to advance our dominion to what it is out of the nature of the thing itself, as chiefly for fear, next for honour, and lastly for profit.
[4]
For when we had the envy of many and had reconquered some that had already revolted, and seeing you were no more our friends as you had been but suspected and quarrelled us, we held it no longer a safe course laying by our power to put ourselves into your danger.
For the revolts from us would all have been made to you.
[5]
Now it is no fault for men in danger to order their affairs to the best.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.