History of the Peloponnesian War

"As to your last charge of wrong-doing on our part—that we unlawfully attacked your city in time of peace and on a day of festival—we do not think that in this matter, either, we are more at fault than you.

If it was of our own motion that we went to your city, fought you, and ravaged your land as enemies, we are in the wrong; but if some of your countrymen, the leading men in both wealth and family,[*](cf. 2.2.2.) wishing to put an end to your alliance with an outsider and to restore you to the traditions of our fathers which are common to all the Boeotians, of their own free will invoked our aid, of what wrong are we guilty? For it is those who lead that break the laws rather than those who follow.[*](Parody on 3.55.4.)

But in my judgment neither they nor we did wrong. They, who are just as much citizens as you and had more at stake, opened their gates and conducted into their own city friends, not enemies, because they wished that the baser sort among you should not become still worse, and that the better sort should have their deserts, being the censors of your political principles[*](σωφρονισταί, regulators or censors, those who bring others to a right mind and are a check on vice and lawlessness It was a technical term applied to magistrates, ten in number, at Athens, who superintended the morals of the youth.) and not seeking to deprive the state of your persons, but rather bringing you back into a natural union with your kindred, and that without making you an enemy of anyone but restoring you to peace with all alike.

"The proof that we acted in no hostile spirit is that we wronged nobody, and made a proclamation that anyone who wished to be a citizen according to the hereditary ways of all the Boeotians should come over to us.

And you came gladly, and entering into an agreement with us you kept quiet at first; but afterwards, when you became aware that we were few in number—even supposing we might seem to have acted somewhat inconsiderately in entering your town without the consent of the popular party—you did not repay us in kind, resorting to no act of violence but endeavouring by arguments to induce us to withdraw, but you assailed us in violation of your agreement. Now as to those whom you killed in hand-to-hand conflict we are not so much grieved—for they suffered, we grant you, by a kind of law—but as regards those whom you spared when they stretched out their hands to you, and then, though you afterwards promised us that you would not kill them, lawlessly butchered—was not that an abominable deed?