Panathenaicus (96-100)

Since, however, the impulse has come to me to speak frankly and I have removed the curb from my tongue, and since I took a subject which is of such a character that it is neither honorable nor possible to leave out the kind of facts from which it can be proved that our city has been of greater service to the Hellenes than Lacedaemon, I must not be silent either about the other wrongs which have not yet been told, albeit they have been done among the Hellenes, but must show that our ancestors have been slow pupils[*] in wrong-doing, whereas the Lacedaemonians have in some respects been the first to point the way and in others have been the sole offenders.

Now most people upbraid both cities because, while pretending that they risked the perils of war against the barbarians for the sake of the Hellenes, they did not in fact allow the various states to be independent and manage their own affairs in whatever way was expedient for each of them, but, on the contrary, divided them up, as if they had taken them captive in war, and reduced them all to slavery, acting no differently than those who rob others of their slaves, on the pretext of liberating them, only to compel them to slave for their new masters.

But it is not the fault of the Athenians that these complaints are made and many others more bitter than these, but rather of those who now in what is being said, as in times past in all that has been done, have been in the opposite camp from us. For no man can show that our ancestors during the countless years of our early history ever attempted to impose our rule over any city great or small, whereas all men know that the Lacedaemonians, from the time when they entered the Peloponnesus, have had no other object in their deeds or in their designs than to impose their rule if possible over all men but, failing that, over the peoples of the Peloponnesus.

And as to the stirring up of faction and slaughter and revolution in these cities, which certain critics impute both to Athens and to Sparta, you will find that the Lacedaemonians have filled all the states, excepting a very few, with these misfortunes and afflictions,[*] whereas no one would dare even to allege that our city, before the disaster which befell her in the Hellespont,[*] ever perpetrated such a thing among her allies.

But when the Lacedaemonians, after having been in the position of dictators over the Hellenes, were being driven from control of affairs—at that juncture, when the other cities were rent by faction, two or three of our generals (I will not hide the truth from you) mistreated some of them, thinking that if they should imitate the deeds of Spartans they would be better able to control them.[*]