Kitap 39
37
"'Well but,' you say, 'these things are your doing, Achaeans-the abolition of the laws and discipline of Lycurgus which have come down from a remote antiquity, and the destruction of the walls.' Now, how can both these charges be made by the same people, seeing that the walls were built, not by Lycurgus but only a few years ago, and built, too, for the purpose of undermining the discipline of Lycurgus? It is quite recently that the tyrants raised them as a stronghold and defence for themselves, not for the city; and if Lycurgus could today rise from the dead, he would be glad to see them in ruins, and would say that he now recognised his old Sparta. For like disfiguring brands they marked you as slaves, and you ought to have torn down and demolished with your own hands, Lacedaemonians, every vestige of the tyrant's rule, and not have waited for Philopoemen and the Achaeans to do it. Whilst for 800 years you were without walls, you were free and for some time the foremost power in Greece, but when shut in by walls, bound as it were by fetters, you have for the last century been slaves. As for the deprivation of their laws and constitution, I consider that the tyrants deprived the Lacedaemonians of their ancient laws; we did not deprive them of their laws and constitution, for they had none; but we gave them our own laws, nor did we in any way do the city a wrong when we made it a member of our council and incorporated it in our League, so that there might be one political body and one common council for the whole of the Peloponnese. If we ourselves had been living at the time under different laws from those which we imposed on them, they could, in my opinion, have complained and felt justly indignant at not enjoying equal rights with us.
