admitted to their citizenship at our own request, and after
receiving benefits at their hands; but it was plainly our duty loyally
to obey their orders. Besides, the faults that either of you may
commit in your supremacy must be laid, not upon the followers, but
on the chiefs that lead them astray.
"With regard to the Thebans, they have wronged us repeatedly, and
their last aggression, which has been the means of bringing us into
our present position, is within your own knowledge. In seizing our
city in time of peace, and what is more at a holy time in the month,
they justly encountered our vengeance, in accordance with the
universal law which sanctions resistance to an invader; and it
cannot now be right that we should suffer on their account. By
taking your own immediate interest and their animosity as the test
of justice, you will prove yourselves to be rather waiters on
expediency than judges of right; although if they seem useful to you
now, we and the rest of the Hellenes gave you much more valuable
help at a time of greater need. Now you are the assailants, and others
fear you; but at the crisis to which we allude, when the barbarian
threatened all with slavery, the Thebans were on his side. It is just,
therefore, to put our patriotism then against our error now, if
error there has been; and you will find the merit outweighing the
fault, and displayed at a juncture when there were few Hellenes who
would set their valour against the strength of Xerxes, and when
greater praise was theirs who preferred the dangerous path of honour
to the safe course of consulting their own interest with respect to
the invasion. To these few we belonged, and highly were we honoured
for it; and yet we now fear to perish by having again acted on the
same principles, and chosen to act well with Athens sooner than wisely
with Sparta. Yet in justice the same cases should be decided in the
same way, and policy should not mean anything else than lasting
gratitude for the service of good ally combined with a proper
attention to one's own immediate interest.
"Consider also that at present the Hellenes generally regard you
as a pattern of worth and honour; and if you pass an unjust sentence
upon us in this which is no obscure cause, but one in which you, the
judges, are as illustrious as we, the prisoners, are blameless, take
care that displeasure be not felt at an unworthy decision in the
matter of honourable men made by men yet more honourable than they,
and at the consecration in the national temples of spoils taken from
the Plataeans, the benefactors of Hellas. Shocking indeed will it seem
for Lacedaemonians to destroy Plataea, and for the city whose name
your fathers inscribed upon the tripod at Delphi for its good service,
to be by you blotted out from the map of Hellas, to please the
Thebans. To such a depth of misfortune have we fallen that, while
the Medes' success had been our ruin, Thebans now supplant us in
your once fond regards; and we have been subjected to two dangers, the
greatest of any- that of dying of starvation then, if we had not
surrendered our town, and now of being tried for our lives. So that we
Plataeans, after exertions beyond our power in the cause of the
Hellenes, are rejected by all, forsaken and unassisted; helped by none
of our allies, and reduced to doubt the stability of our only hope,
yourselves.
"Still, in the name of the gods who once presided over our
confederacy, and of our own good service in the Hellenic cause, we
adjure you to relent; to recall the decision which we fear that the
Thebans may have obtained from you; to ask back the gift that you have
given them, that they disgrace not you by slaying us; to gain a pure
instead of a guilty gratitude, and not to gratify others to be
yourselves rewarded with shame. Our lives may be quickly taken, but it
will be a heavy task to wipe away the infamy of the deed; as we are no
enemies whom you might justly punish, but friends forced into taking
arms against you. To grant us our lives would be, therefore, a
righteous judgment; if you consider also that we are prisoners who
surrendered of their own accord, stretching out our hands for quarter,