History of the Peloponnesian War

"And yet, for the sake of the gods who once presided over our confederacy, and of our valour in the cause of the Greeks, we call on you to relent and change your mind, if you have been persuaded to any thing by the Thebans; and to ask as a boon from them in return, that they would not kill those whose death is not honourable to you; and to receive an honest gratitude [from us], instead of a disgraceful one [from them];

and not, after giving pleasure to others, to incur infamy for it yourselves. For it is an easy matter to take away our lives, but a difficult one to wipe out the disgrace of it;

since we are not enemies, that you should justly take vengeance on us, but men well disposed towards you, and who went to war with you only on compulsion. You would judge the case therefore rightly, if you both granted us personal security, and considered beforehand that you received us by our own consent, and while holding forth our hands to you—and the law of the Greeks is not to kill such—and, moreover, after our being all along your benefactors.

For look to the sepulchres of your fathers, whom, after being slain by the Medes, and buried in our country, we used to honour every year at the public expense with both garments and other things that are usual, and by offering first-fruits of all that our land produced in its season; as friends from a friendly country, and as allies to our former companions in arms.

But you would do the contrary of this, should you decide unjustly. For consider: Pausanias buried them with a conviction that he was laying them in a friendly land, and amongst men of that character; but you, if you kill us, and make the Plataean territory a part of the Theban, what else will you do but leave your fathers and kinsmen in a hostile country, and amongst their murderers, unhonoured with the gifts which they now receive? And further, you will condemn to slavery the land in which the Greeks won their freedom; will desolate the temples of the gods to whom they prayed, before conquering the Medes; and will take away our ancestral sacrifices from those who founded and instituted them.