[35]
And one of them even said something like this: “But if you and we, gentlemen, come to agreement, there is hope now that the Thebans will be decimated, as the old saying has it.” The Athenians, however, were not very much inclined to accept all this, and a murmur went round to the effect that “this is what they say now, but in the time when1 they were prosperous they were hostile to us.” The weightiest of the arguments urged by the Lacedaemonians seemed to their hearers to be, that at the time when they subdued the Athenians, though the Thebans wanted to destroy Athens utterly, it was they who had prevented it.
1 370 B.C.
Xenophon. Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 1 and 2. Carleton L. Brownson. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. vol. 1:1918; vol. 2: 1921.
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