History of the Peloponnesian War

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.

This were not to your credit, Lacedaemonians, nor to offend against the general principles of the Greeks and your own forefathers, nor to destroy us, your benefactors, for other men's hatred of us, without having been wronged yourselves; but rather, to spare us, and relent in your hearts, having taken a rational pity on us; reflecting not only on the dreadful nature of the things we should suffer, but also on the character of the sufferers, and how misfortune admits not of calculating on whom it may one day fall, even without his deserving it.

We then, as is suitable for us, and as our need induces us to do, entreat you, with invocations to the gods who are worshipped at the same altar, and by all the Greeks in common, that we may prevail on you in these things; pleading the oaths which your fathers swore, we pray that you will not be unmindful of them: we beseech you by your fathers' tombs, and appeal for aid to the dead, that we may not come under the power of the Thebans, nor those who are dearest to them be given up to those who are most hateful. We remind you, too, of that day on which we performed the most glorious things in their company, and yet now on this day are in danger of suffering the most dreadful.