Panathenaicus (186-190)

For such men are much more deserving of our praise than those who, while ready and willing to face death to gain the possessions of others, are yet in no wise different from hireling soldiers. For these are the acts of men depraved, and if men of honest purpose sometimes come off worse in the struggle than men who desire to do injustice, we may attribute this to negligence of the gods.

But I might apply this point also to the misfortune which befell the Spartans at Thermopylae, which all who have heard of it praise and admire more than the battles and victories which have been won over adversaries against whom wars ought never to have been waged,[*] albeit some are without scruple in extolling such successes, not realizing that nothing is either righteous or honorable which is not said or done with justice.[*]

But the Spartans have never given a thought to this truth; for they look to no other object than that of securing for themselves as many of the possessions of other peoples as they can. Our ancestors, on the other hand, have shown concern for nothing in the world so much as for a good name among the Hellenes; for they considered that there could be no truer or fairer judgement than that which is rendered by a whole race of people.

And they have been manifestly of this mind both in their government of the state in other respects and in the conduct of the greatest affairs. For in the three wars,[*] apart from the Trojan war, which were fought by the Hellenes against the barbarians—in all these they placed our city in the forefront of the fighting. Of these wars, one was the struggle against Xerxes,[*] in which they were as much superior to the Lacedaemonians in every crisis as were the latter to the rest of the Hellenes.

Another was the war connected with the founding of the colonies,[*] in which none of the Dorians came to help them, but in which Athens, having been made the leader of those who were lacking in the means of subsistence and of all others who desired to join with her, so completely reversed the state of affairs that, whereas the barbarians had been wont in times past to seize and hold the greatest cities of Hellas, she placed the Hellenes in a position where they were able to do what they had formerly suffered.