63.
'And now we will proceed to show that you, and not we, have done the greater wrong
to1 Hellas, and are deserving of every sort of punishment.
[2]
You say that you became allies and citizens of Athens in order that you might be
protected against us.
If so, you ought to have invited their aid only against us, and not to have assisted
them in their attacks upon others; such a course was certainly open to you: even if you
had been in some degree constrained against your will by the Athenians, you had
previously made the alliance with the Lacedaemonians against the Persians, to which you
are so fond of appealing.
That alliance would at any rate have restrained our hands, and above all would have
secured to you freedom of deliberation.
But you acted willingly, and were no longer under compulsion when you made common cause
with the Athenians.
[3]
Your allegation is that they were your benefactors and that you could not honourably
betray them; but how far more dishonourable and wicked to betray all the Hellenes with
whom you had sworn alliance, than the Athenians only, the one the liberators, the other
the enslavers of Hellas!
[4]
The return which you made to them is unequal, nay, infamous,; you say that you invited
them to assist you because you were wronged, and then you became their accomplices in
wronging others.
Surely ingratitude is shown in refusing to return an honourable kindness, when it can
be done honourably, not in refusing to return a kindness which, however
justly due, cannot be repaid without a crime.
1 But they of their own free-will abetted the Athenians in their aggressions upon Hellas. They plead obligation but no obligation can justify a crime.
Thucydides translated into English; with introduction, marginal analysis, notes, and indices. Volume 1. Thucydides. Benjamin Jowett. translator. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1881.
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