Pericles maintained that his countrymen, without submitting to the hardships of a Spartan education, rivalled all the achievements of Spartan valour, and that therefore the pleasures and amusements which they enjoyed were to be considered as so much clear gain.

The infantry of Athens was certainly not equal to that of Lacedaemon; but this seems to have been caused merely by want of practice: the attention of the Athenians was diverted from the discipline of the phalanx to that of the trireme.

The Lacedaemonians, in spite of all their boasted valour, were, from the same cause, timid and disorderly in naval action.
But we are told that crimes of great enormity were perpetrated by the Athenian government, and the democracies under its protection.

It is true that Athens too often acted up to the full extent of the laws of war in an age when those laws had not been mitigated by causes which have operated in later times.

This accusation is, in fact, common to Athens, to Lacedaemon, to all the states of Greece, and to all states similarly situated.