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Remember also that you undertook your most recent war,378-374 B.C. not to secure the freedom of either yourselves or your allies (for you all enjoyed that already), but in behalf of those who were being deprived of their autonomy in violation of the oaths and covenants. But surely it would be the most outrageous thing in the world, if you are going to permit these cities, which you thought ought not to be in servitude to the Lacedaemonians, now to be destroyed by the Thebans—men who are so far from emulating your clemency that it would have been better for us to suffer at the hands of this city that fate which is regarded as the most dreadful of all misfortunes,
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to be taken prisoners of war, than to have got them as neighbors; for those whose cities were taken by you by storm were straightway freed of a Spartan governor and of slavery, and now they have share in a Council and in freedom, whereas, of those who live anywhere near the Thebans, some are no less slaves than those who have been bought with money, and as for the rest, the Thebans will not stop until they have brought them to the condition in which we now are.
