"All Greeks, therefore, should foresee the approaching storm and especially the Lacedaemonians.
For why do you think it was, men of <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Sparta&groupId=660&placeId=1208">Sparta</a>, that your ancestors, at the time when Xerxes sent you an envoy demanding water and earth, thrust the stranger into the well and heaped earth upon him, and bade him to announce to Xerxes that he had received what was demanded, water and earth?
Or why did Leonidas and his men march forth of their own will to meet certain death?
Surely it was to show that they were risking their lives not for their own freedom alone, but for that of the other Greeks.
It very well become study, the descendants of such men, to make an alliance now with barbarians, to take the field with them and make war on the Epirots, Achaeans, Acarnanians, Boeotians, and Thessalians, in fact with almost all the Greeks except the Aetolians!
They indeed are accustomed to act so and to think nothing disgraceful if only something is to be gained by it, but it is not so with you.
And what feats do you expect they will accomplish when they have gained the alliance of <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Rome&groupId=935&placeId=1669">Rome</a>,
the people who, when you were reinforced by the help of the Illyrians, attempted by sea to surprise and treacherously take <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Pylus&groupId=920&placeId=1648">Pylus</a> and on land laid siege to Cleitor and sold the citizens of Cynaetha into slavery?
Formerly, as I already said, they made a treaty with Antigonus for the destruction of the Achaean and Acarnanian Leagues, and now they have made one with the Romans against the whole of Greece.
Walbank Commentary