History of the Peloponnesian War

"Consider, too, that at present you are esteemed by the Greeks in general a pattern of honour and virtue: but if you pass an unjust sentence on us, (for this is no obscure cause that you will decide, but as men of high repute yourselves, you will pass sentence on us who are also not contemptible,) beware lest they may not approve of your coming to any improper decision respecting men of good character, though you are yourselves of still better; nor of spoils which were taken from us, the benefactors of Greece, being devoted in the national temples.

For it will seem a shocking thing that Lacedaemonians should have destroyed Plataea; and that your fathers should have inscribed the name of that city on the tripod at Delphi for its good services, whereas you utterly obliterated it from the whole Grecian name for the sake of Thebans. For to such a degree of misfortune have we been brought:

if the Medes had been victorious, we should have been ruined; and now we are supplanted by Thebans in your good opinion, who were before our best friends; and we have been subjected to two dangers, the greatest that can be imagined—then, to that of being [*](Bloomfield, in his last edition, rightly explains αἰσχίστῳ (as Göller had already done) by comparing the words of Ammianus Marcellinus, fame, ignavissimo mortis genere, tabescentes; and observes that to be pined to death was, according to the idea of the ancients, a death, as compared with that of dying with arms in one's hands, especially ignominious, as suggesting the idea of a snared brute beast. Yet he inconsistently retains the part of his original note, in which he objected to Hobbes rendering the word by base, a term to which Hobbes himself doubtless attached the same meaning. Gottleber and Poppo refer ἐσαμένων as well as κτισάντων to θυσίας; and the collocation of the words certainly makes this the most natural mode of explaining them. Bloomfield, however, denies that ἕω is ever used in such a figurative sense, and maintains that it can only refer here to ἱερά.) starved to death, if we had not surrendered our city; and now, to that of being tried for our lives.

And thus we Plataeans, who were zealous beyond our power in the cause of the Greeks, are rejected by all, deserted and unassisted; for of those who were then our allies, no one helps us; and as for you, Lacedaemonians, our only hope, we fear that you are not to be depended upon.