permits it having the means to prevent it; particularly if that
power aspires to the glory of being the liberator of Hellas. We are at
last assembled. It has not been easy to assemble, nor even now are our
objects defined. We ought not to be still inquiring into the fact of
our wrongs, but into the means of our defence. For the aggressors with
matured plans to oppose to our indecision have cast threats aside
and betaken themselves to action. And we know what are the paths by
which Athenian aggression travels, and how insidious is its
progress. A degree of confidence she may feel from the idea that
your bluntness of perception prevents your noticing her; but it is
nothing to the impulse which her advance will receive from the
knowledge that you see, but do not care to interfere. You,
Lacedaemonians, of all the Hellenes are alone inactive, and defend
yourselves not by doing anything but by looking as if you would do
something; you alone wait till the power of an enemy is becoming twice
its original size, instead of crushing it in its infancy. And yet
the world used to say that you were to be depended upon; but in your
case, we fear, it said more than the truth. The Mede, we ourselves
know, had time to come from the ends of the earth to Peloponnese,
without any force of yours worthy of the name advancing to meet him.
But this was a distant enemy. Well, Athens at all events is a near
neighbour, and yet Athens you utterly disregard; against Athens you
prefer to act on the defensive instead of on the offensive, and to
make it an affair of chances by deferring the struggle till she has
grown far stronger than at first. And yet you know that on the whole
the rock on which the barbarian was wrecked was himself, and that if
our present enemy Athens has not again and again annihilated us, we
owe it more to her blunders than to your protection; Indeed,
expectations from you have before now been the ruin of some, whose
faith induced them to omit preparation.
"We hope that none of you will consider these words of
remonstrance to be rather words of hostility; men remonstrate with
friends who are in error, accusations they reserve for enemies who
have wronged them. Besides, we consider that we have as good a right
as any one to point out a neighbour's faults, particularly when we
contemplate the great contrast between the two national characters;
a contrast of which, as far as we can see, you have little perception,
having never yet considered what sort of antagonists you will
encounter in the Athenians, how widely, how absolutely different
from yourselves. The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their
designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and
execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got,
accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you
never go far enough. Again, they are adventurous beyond their power,
and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine;
your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to
mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that
from danger there is no release. Further, there is promptitude on
their side against procrastination on yours; they are never at home,
you are never from it: for they hope by their absence to extend
their acquisitions, you fear by your advance to endanger what you have
left behind. They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil
from a reverse. Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their
country's cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed
in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a
successful enterprise a comparative failure. The deficiency created by
the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes;
for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by
the speed with which they act upon their resolutions. Thus they toil
on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little
opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting: their only
idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them
laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet
life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say