History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides [best free ebook reader TXT] 📗

place ourselves were you, and

you only (from whom we thought we were most likely to obtain justice),

and not other persons, as is now the case. As matters stand, we are

afraid that we have been doubly deceived. We have good reason to

suspect, not only that the issue to be tried is the most terrible of

all, but that you will not prove impartial; if we may argue from the

fact that no accusation was first brought forward for us to answer,

but we had ourselves to ask leave to speak, and from the question

being put so shortly, that a true answer to it tells against us, while

a false one can be contradicted. In this dilemma, our safest, and

indeed our only course, seems to be to say something at all risks:

placed as we are, we could scarcely be silent without being

tormented by the damning thought that speaking might have saved us.

Another difficulty that we have to encounter is the difficulty of

convincing you. Were we unknown to each other we might profit by

bringing forward new matter with which you were unacquainted: as it

is, we can tell you nothing that you do not know already, and we fear,

not that you have condemned us in your own minds of having failed in

our duty towards you, and make this our crime, but that to please a

third party we have to submit to a trial the result of which is

already decided. Nevertheless, we will place before you what we can

justly urge, not only on the question of the quarrel which the Thebans

have against us, but also as addressing you and the rest of the

Hellenes; and we will remind you of our good services, and endeavour

to prevail with you.

 

“To your short question, whether we have done the Lacedaemonians and

allies any service in this war, we say, if you ask us as enemies, that

to refrain from serving you was not to do you injury; if as friends,

that you are more in fault for having marched against us. During the

peace, and against the Mede, we acted well: we have not now been the

first to break the peace, and we were the only Boeotians who then

joined in defending against the Mede the liberty of Hellas. Although

an inland people, we were present at the action at Artemisium; in

the battle that took place in our territory we fought by the side of

yourselves and Pausanias; and in all the other Hellenic exploits of

the time we took a part quite out of proportion to our strength.

Besides, you, as Lacedaemonians, ought not to forget that at the

time of the great panic at Sparta, after the earthquake, caused by the

secession of the Helots to Ithome, we sent the third part of our

citizens to assist you.

 

“On these great and historical occasions such was the part that we

chose, although afterwards we became your enemies. For this you were

to blame. When we asked for your alliance against our Theban

oppressors, you rejected our petition, and told us to go to the

Athenians who were our neighbours, as you lived too far off. In the

war we never have done to you, and never should have done to you,

anything unreasonable. If we refused to desert the Athenians when

you asked us, we did no wrong; they had helped us against the

Thebans when you drew back, and we could no longer give them up with

honour; especially as we had obtained their alliance and had been

admitted to their citizenship at our own request, and after

receiving benefits at their hands; but it was plainly our duty loyally

to obey their orders. Besides, the faults that either of you may

commit in your supremacy must be laid, not upon the followers, but

on the chiefs that lead them astray.

 

“With regard to the Thebans, they have wronged us repeatedly, and

their last aggression, which has been the means of bringing us into

our present position, is within your own knowledge. In seizing our

city in time of peace, and what is more at a holy time in the month,

they justly encountered our vengeance, in accordance with the

universal law which sanctions resistance to an invader; and it

cannot now be right that we should suffer on their account. By

taking your own immediate interest and their animosity as the test

of justice, you will prove yourselves to be rather waiters on

expediency than judges of right; although if they seem useful to you

now, we and the rest of the Hellenes gave you much more valuable

help at a time of greater need. Now you are the assailants, and others

fear you; but at the crisis to which we allude, when the barbarian

threatened all with slavery, the Thebans were on his side. It is just,

therefore, to put our patriotism then against our error now, if

error there has been; and you will find the merit outweighing the

fault, and displayed at a juncture when there were few Hellenes who

would set their valour against the strength of Xerxes, and when

greater praise was theirs who preferred the dangerous path of honour

to the safe course of consulting their own interest with respect to

the invasion. To these few we belonged, and highly were we honoured

for it; and yet we now fear to perish by having again acted on the

same principles, and chosen to act well with Athens sooner than wisely

with Sparta. Yet in justice the same cases should be decided in the

same way, and policy should not mean anything else than lasting

gratitude for the service of good ally combined with a proper

attention to one’s own immediate interest.

 

“Consider also that at present the Hellenes generally regard you

as a pattern of worth and honour; and if you pass an unjust sentence

upon us in this which is no obscure cause, but one in which you, the

judges, are as illustrious as we, the prisoners, are blameless, take

care that displeasure be not felt at an unworthy decision in the

matter of honourable men made by men yet more honourable than they,

and at the consecration in the national temples of spoils taken from

the Plataeans, the benefactors of Hellas. Shocking indeed will it seem

for Lacedaemonians to destroy Plataea, and for the city whose name

your fathers inscribed upon the tripod at Delphi for its good service,

to be by you blotted out from the map of Hellas, to please the

Thebans. To such a depth of misfortune have we fallen that, while

the Medes’ success had been our ruin, Thebans now supplant us in

your once fond regards; and we have been subjected to two dangers, the

greatest of any—that of dying of starvation then, if we had not

surrendered our town, and now of being tried for our lives. So that we

Plataeans, after exertions beyond our power in the cause of the

Hellenes, are rejected by all, forsaken and unassisted; helped by none

of our allies, and reduced to doubt the stability of our only hope,

yourselves.

 

“Still, in the name of the gods who once presided over our

confederacy, and of our own good service in the Hellenic cause, we

adjure you to relent; to recall the decision which we fear that the

Thebans may have obtained from you; to ask back the gift that you have

given them, that they disgrace not you by slaying us; to gain a pure

instead of a guilty gratitude, and not to gratify others to be

yourselves rewarded with shame. Our lives may be quickly taken, but it

will be a heavy task to wipe away the infamy of the deed; as we are no

enemies whom you might justly punish, but friends forced into taking

arms against you. To grant us our lives would be, therefore, a

righteous judgment; if you consider also that we are prisoners who

surrendered of their own accord, stretching out our hands for quarter,

whose slaughter Hellenic law forbids, and who besides were always your

benefactors. Look at the sepulchres of your fathers, slain by the

Medes and buried in our country, whom year by year we honoured with

garments and all other dues, and the first-fruits of all that our land

produced in their season, as friends from a friendly country and

allies to our old companions in arms. Should you not decide aright,

your conduct would be the very opposite to ours. Consider only:

Pausanias buried them thinking that he was laying them in friendly

ground and among men as friendly; but you, if you kill us and make the

Plataean territory Theban, will leave your fathers and kinsmen in a

hostile soil and among their murderers, deprived of the honours

which they now enjoy. What is more, you will enslave the land in which

the freedom of the Hellenes was won, make desolate the temples of

the gods to whom they prayed before they overcame the Medes, and

take away your ancestral sacrifices from those who founded and

instituted them.

 

“It were not to your glory, Lacedaemonians, either to offend in this

way against the common law of the Hellenes and against your own

ancestors, or to kill us your benefactors to gratify another’s

hatred without having been wronged yourselves: it were more so to

spare us and to yield to the impressions of a reasonable compassion;

reflecting not merely on the awful fate in store for us, but also on

the character of the sufferers, and on the impossibility of predicting

how soon misfortune may fall even upon those who deserve it not. We,

as we have a right to do and as our need impels us, entreat you,

calling aloud upon the gods at whose common altar all the Hellenes

worship, to hear our request, to be not unmindful of the oaths which

your fathers swore, and which we now plead—we supplicate you by the

tombs of your fathers, and appeal to those that are gone to save us

from falling into the hands of the Thebans and their dearest friends

from being given up to their most detested foes. We also remind you of

that day on which we did the most glorious deeds, by your fathers’

sides, we who now on this are like to suffer the most dreadful fate.

Finally, to do what is necessary and yet most difficult for men in our

situation—that is, to make an end of speaking, since with that

ending the peril of our lives draws near—in conclusion we say that

we did not surrender our city to the Thebans (to that we would have

preferred inglorious starvation), but trusted in and capitulated to

you; and it would be just, if we fail to persuade you, to put us

back in the same position and let us take the chance that falls to us.

And at the same time we adjure you not to give us up—your

suppliants, Lacedaemonians, out of your hands and faith, Plataeans

foremost of the Hellenic patriots, to Thebans, our most hated

enemies—but to be our saviours, and not, while you free the rest of

the Hellenes, to bring us to destruction.”

 

Such were the words of the Plataeans. The Thebans, afraid that the

Lacedaemonians might be moved by what they had heard, came forward and

said that they too desired to address them, since the Plataeans had,

against their wish, been allowed to speak at length instead of being

confined to a simple answer to the question. Leave being granted,

the Thebans spoke as follows:

 

“We should never have asked to make this speech if the Plataeans

on their side had contented themselves with shortly answering the

question, and had not turned round and made charges against us,

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