r
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