13
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.
14
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.
15
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.
16
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).
