History of the Peloponnesian War

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.

"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.