Since we Plataeans know, Athenians, that it is your custom not only zealously to come to the rescue of victims of injustice, but also to requite your benefactors with the utmost gratitude, we have come as suppliants to beg you not to remain indifferent to our having been driven from our homes in time of peace by the Thebans. And since many peoples in the past have fled to you for protection and have obtained all they craved, we think it beseems you more than others to show solicitude for our city;

for victims of a greater injustice than ourselves, or any who have been plunged into calamities so great, you could not find anywhere, nor any people who for a longer time have maintained toward your city a more loyal friendship.Cf. Herodotus vi. 108. Athens and Platea were allied as early as 510 B.C. Furthermore, we have come here to ask you for assistance of such a kind that your granting it will involve you in no danger whatever and yet will cause all the world to regard you as the most scrupulous and most just of all the Greeks.

If we did not observe that the Thebans have schemed to win you over, by fair means or foul, to their contention that they have done us no wrong, we could have finished our plea in a few words. But since we have reached such a state of misfortune that we must struggle, not only against them, but also against the ablest of your orators, men whom they have hired with our resources to be their advocatesAthenian venal advocates are meant. we must explain our cause at greater length.

It is difficult indeed not to speak inadequately on the subject of our wrongs. For what eloquence could match our misfortunes, or what orator could adequately denounce the wrongs the Thebans have done? Nevertheless, we must try to the best of our ability to make their transgressions known.

And the chief cause of our indignation is that we are so far from being judged worthy of equality with the rest of the Greeks that, although we are at peaceThis seems to be a reference to the peace of 374 B.C., made between Athens and Sparta (see Jebb, ii. p. 177). and although treaties exist, we not only have no share in the liberty which all the rest enjoy, but that we are not considered worthy of even a moderate condition of servitude.