might come to our assistance against it we shall have no allies. I too say that
we should try to recover Oropus. But the argument that the Spartans will be our
enemies now, if we make alliance with those Arcadians who desire our friendship,
is an argument which no one has less right even to mention, than those who
induced you to help the Spartans when they were in danger. {12} Such was not
their argument, when all the Peloponnesians came to you,[n] entreating you to
support them in their campaign against Sparta, and they persuaded you to reject
the entreaty, with the result that the Peloponnesians took the only remaining
course and applied to Thebes--when they bade you contribute funds and imperil
your lives for the deliverance of the Spartans. Nor, I presume, would you have
been willing to protect them, had they warned you that you must expect no
gratitude for their deliverance, unless, after saving them, you allowed them
once more to do as they pleased and commit fresh aggressions. {13} And further,
however antagonistic it may be to the designs of the Spartans, that we should
make the Arcadians our allies, they are surely bound to feel a gratitude towards
us for saving them when they were in the utmost extremity, which will outweigh
their vexation at our preventing their present wrongdoing. Must they not then
either assist us to recover Oropus, or else be regarded as the basest of
mankind? For, by Heaven, I can see no other alternative.

{14} I am astonished, also, to hear it argued that if we make the Arcadians our
allies, and carry out my advice, it will seem as though Athens were changing her
policy, and were utterly unreliable. I believe that the exact reverse of this is
the case, men of Athens, and I will tell you why. I suppose that no one in the
world can deny that when this city saved the Spartans,[n] and before them the
Thebans,[n] and finally the Euboeans,[n] and subsequently made them her allies,
she had one and the same end always in view. {15} And what was this? It was to
deliver the victims of aggression. And if this is so, it is not we that should
be changing, but those who refuse to adhere to the right; and it will be
manifest that, although circumstances change from time to time with the