How then can you suppose we shall conduct ourselves towards the Argives, who are acquitted of having publicly authorized misconduct?
You said, that your inviting slaves to liberty, and the distribution of lands among the indigent, were objected to you as crimes; and crimes, surely, they are, of no small magnitude.

But what are they in comparison with those atrocious deeds, that are daily perpetrated by you and your adherents, in continual succession?
Show us a free assembly of the people, either at Argos or Lacedaemon, if you wish to hear a true recital of the crimes of the most abandoned tyranny.

To omit all other instances of older date, what a massacre did your son-in-law, Pythagoras, make at Argos almost before my eyes! What another did you yourself perpetrate, when I was nearly within the confines of the Lacedaemonians! Now, give orders, that the persons whom you took out of the midst of an assembly, and committed to prison, after declaring, in the hearing of all your countrymen, that you would keep them in custody, be produced in their chains, that their wretched parents may know that those are alive, for whom, under a false impression, they are mourning.

Well, but you say, though all these things were so, Romans, how do they concern you?
Can you say this to the deliverers of Greece; to people who crossed the sea, and have maintained a war on sea and land, to effect its deliverance?
Still you tell us, you have not directly violated the alliance, or the friendship established between us.

How many instances must I produce of your having done so?
But I will not go into long detail; I will bring the matter to a short issue.