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 Cf. Isoc. 12.101 . 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, See Isoc. 4.114 . whereas no one would dare
 even to allege that our city, before the disaster which befell her in the Hellespont , At Aegospotami , 405 b.c. See Isoc.
 4.119 . 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. See, however,
 Isocrates’ bitter attack upon the Athenian militaristic policy in On the
 Peace , especially Isoc. 8.44 . Among the Athenian
 generals, he is here thinking mainly of Chares (the enemy and opposite of his friend and
 pupil, Timotheus. See Isoc. 15.129 and note), who seems to
 have uniformly preferred force to persuasion or conciliation in the treatment of the
 Athenian allies. See Introduction to Isoc. 8 .