The facts recounted in the preceding chapters will have shown, that the account given by the Athenian envoy at Sparta, of the origin and character of the empire exercised by his city, though doubtless the account of a partisan, is in substance correct and equitable; the envoys of Athens had not yet learned to take the tone which they assumed in the sixteenth and seventeenth years of the coming war, at Melos and Kamarina. At any time previous to the affair of Korkyra, the topics insisted upon by the Athenian would probably have been profoundly listened to at Sparta. But now the mind of the Spartans was made up. Having cleared the assembly of all “strangers,” and even all allies, they proceeded to discuss and determine the question among themselves. Most of their speakers held but one language,[143]—expatiating on the wrongs already done by Athens, and urging the necessity of instant war. There was, however, one voice, and that a commanding voice, raised against this conclusion: the ancient and respected king Archidamus opposed it. [143] Thucyd. i, 79. καὶ τῶν μὲν πλειόνων ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτὸ αἱ γνῶμαι ἔφερον, ἀδικεῖν τε Ἀθηναίους ἤδη, καὶ πολεμητέα εἶναι ἐν τάχει. The speech of Archidamus is that of a deliberate Spartan, who, setting aside both hatred to Athens and blind partiality to allies, looks at the question with a view to the interests and honor of Sparta only,—not, however, omitting her imperial as well as her separate character. The preceding native speakers, indignant against Athens, had probably appealed to Spartan pride, treating it as an intolerable disgrace that almost the entire land-force of Dorian Peloponnesus should be thus bullied by one single Ionic city, and should hesitate to commence a war which one invasion of Attica would probably terminate. As the Corinthians had tried to excite the Spartans by well-timed taunts and reproaches, so the subsequent speakers had aimed at the same objects by panegyric upon the well-known valor and discipline of the city. To all these arguments Archidamus set himself to reply. Invoking the experience of the elders his contemporaries around him, he impressed upon the assembly the grave responsibility, the uncertainties, difficulties, and perils, of the war into which they were hurrying without preparation.[144] He reminded them of the wealth, the population, greater than that of any other Grecian city, the naval force, the cavalry, the hoplites, the large foreign dominion of Athens,—and then asked by what means they proposed to put her down?[145] Ships, they had few; trained seamen, yet fewer; wealth, next to none. They could indeed invade and ravage Attica, by their superior numbers and land-force: but the Athenians had possessions abroad sufficient to enable them to dispense with the produce of Attica, while their great navy would retaliate the like ravages upon Peloponnesus. To suppose that one or two devastating expeditions into Attica would bring