Plataicus (51-55)

All these things we ask you to bear in mind and to take some measure of consideration for us. For indeed we are not aliens to you; on the contrary, all of us are akin to you in our loyalty and most of us in blood also; for by the right of intermarriage[*] granted to us we are born of mothers who were of your city. You cannot, therefore, be indifferent to the pleas we have come to make.

For it would be the cruellest blow of all, if you, having long ago bestowed upon us the right of a common citizenship with yourselves, should now decide not even to restore to us our own. Furthermore, it is not reasonable that, while every individual who is the victim of injustice receives pity at your hands, yet an entire city so lawlessly destroyed should be unable in the slightest degree to win commiseration from you, especially when it has taken refuge with you who in former times incurred neither shame nor infamy when you showed pity for suppliants.

For when the Argives came to your ancestors and implored them to take up for burial the bodies of the dead at the foot of the Cadmea,[*] your forefathers yielded to their persuasion and compelled the Thebans to adopt measures more conformable to our usage, and thus not only gained renown for themselves in those times, but also bequeathed to your city a glory never to be forgotten for all time to come, and this glory it would be unworthy of you to betray. For it is disgraceful that you should pride yourselves on the glorious deeds of your ancestors and then be found acting concerning your suppliants in a manner the very opposite of theirs.

And yet the entreaties that we have come here to make are of far more weight and are more just; for the Argives came to you as suppliants after they had invaded an alien territory, whereas we have come after having lost our own; they called upon you to take up the bodies of their dead, but we do it for the rescue of the survivors.

But it is not an equal or even similar evil that the dead should be denied burial and that the living should be despoiled of their fatherland and all their goods besides: nay, in the former case it is a greater disgrace for those who prevent the burial than for those who suffer the misfortune, but in the latter, to have no refuge, to be without a fatherland, daily to suffer hardships and to watch without having the power to succor the suffering of one’s own, why need I say how far this has exceeded all other calamities?