History of the Peloponnesian War

For being none of your enemies but well-willers and such as have entered into the war upon constraint, you cannot put us to death with justice.

Therefore, if you will judge uncorruptly, you ought to secure our persons and to remember that you received us by our own voluntary submission and with hands upheld (and it is the law among Grecians not to put such to death), besides that we have from time to time been beneficial to you. For look upon the sepulchres of your fathers whom, slain by the Medes and buried in this territory of ours, we have yearly honoured at the public charge both with vestments and other rites; and of such things as our land hath produced, we have offered unto them the first fruits of it all, as friends in an amicable land and confederates use to do to those that have formerly been their fellows in arms.

But now by a wrong sentence you shall do the contrary of this. For consider this. Pausanias, as he thought, interred these men in amicable ground and amongst their friends. But you, if you slay us, and of Plataeis make Thebais, what do you but leave your fathers and kindred, deprived of the honours they now have, in an hostile territory and amongst the very men that slew them? And moreover, put into servitude that soil whereon the Grecians were put into liberty? And make desolate the temples wherein they prayed when they prevailed against the Medes? And destroy the patrial sacrifices which were instituted by the builders and founders of the same?

These things are not for your glory, men of Lacedaemon, nor to violate the common institutions of Greece and wrong your progenitors, nor to destroy us that have done you service for the hatred of another when you have received no injury from us yourselves, but to spare our lives, to relent, to have a moderate compassion in contemplation not only of the greatness of the punishment but also of who we are that must suffer and of the uncertainty where calamity may light, and that undeservedly.

Which we, as becometh us and our need compelleth us to do, cry aloud unto the common gods of Greece to persuade you unto producing the oath sworn by your fathers to put you in mind; and also we become here sanctuary men at the sepulchres of your fathers, crying out upon the dead not to suffer themselves to be in the power of the Thebans nor to let their greatest friends be betrayed into the hands of their greatest enemies, remembering them of that day upon which, though we have done glorious acts in their company, yet we are in danger at this day of most miserable suffering.