"The Athenian envoys at Sparta in 432 [BC] defend their empire in plain terms: “It has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger... no one has ever allowed the cry for justice to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by might” though this passage, and the supposed speech of the Athenian leaders at Melos, may be exercises of Thucydides’ philosophical imagination, inflamed by the cynical discourses of certain Sophists; it would be as fair to judge the Greeks from the unconventional ethics of Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Thucydides as it would be to describe the modern European by the brilliant bizarreries of Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, and Stirner—not saying how fair that would be.... Perhaps, however, the Greeks differ from ourselves not in conduct but in candor; our greater delicacy makes it offensive to us to preach what we practice."
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Ch. XIII The Morals and Manners of the Greeks, Sec IV Morals, P.375-376
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization
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The Story of Civilization
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