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68.
"Men of Lacedaemon, your own fidelity both in matter of estate and conversation maketh you the less apt to believe us when we accuse others of the contrary.
And hereby you gain indeed a reputation of equity, but you have less experience in the affairs of foreign states.
[2]
For although we have oftentimes foretold you that the Athenians would do us a mischief, yet from time to time when we told it you, you never would take information of it but have suspected rather that what we spake hath proceeded from our own private differences.
And you have therefore called hither these confederates not before we had suffered but now when the evil is already upon us.
Before whom our speech must be so much the longer by how much our objections are the greater in that we have both by the Athenians been injured and by you neglected.
[3]
If the Athenians lurking in some obscure place had done these wrongs unto the Grecians, we should then have needed to prove the same before you as to men that knew it not.
But now what cause have we to use long discourse when you see already that some are brought into servitude, and that they are contriving the like against others, and especially against our confederates, and are themselves, in case war should be made against them, long since prepared for it?
[4]
For else they would never have taken Corcyra and holden it from us by force, nor have besieged Potidaea, whereof the one was most commodious for any action against Thrace, and the other had brought unto the Peloponnesians a most fair navy.
The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Thucydides. Thomas Hobbes. translator. London. Bohn. 1843.
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