For it would be the cruellest blow of all, if you, having long ago bestowed upon us the right of a common citizenship with yourselves, should now decide not even to restore to us our own. Furthermore, it is not reasonable that, while every individual who is the victim of injustice receives pity at your hands, yet an entire city so lawlessly destroyed should be unable in the slightest degree to win commiseration from you, especially when it has taken refuge with you who in former times incurred neither shame nor infamy when you showed pity for suppliants.

For when the Argives came to your ancestors and implored them to take up for burial the bodies of the dead at the foot of the Cadmea,See Isoc. 4.55 (Vol. I, p. 153). your forefathers yielded to their persuasion and compelled the Thebans to adopt measures more conformable to our usage, and thus not only gained renown for themselves in those times, but also bequeathed to your city a glory never to be forgotten for all time to come, and this glory it would be unworthy of you to betray. For it is disgraceful that you should pride yourselves on the glorious deeds of your ancestors and then be found acting concerning your suppliants in a manner the very opposite of theirs.

And yet the entreaties that we have come here to make are of far more weight and are more just; for the Argives came to you as suppliants after they had invaded an alien territory, whereas we have come after having lost our own; they called upon you to take up the bodies of their dead, but we do it for the rescue of the survivors.