and when there proved to be many who were inclined and persuaded to take this course,
 they organized them into an army, conquered the peoples who occupied the islands of the
 barbarians and who dwelt along the coast of either continent, expelled them all, and
 settled in their stead those of the Hellenes who stood in greatest need of the necessities
 of life. And they continued doing this and setting this example to others until they
 learned that the Spartans, as I have related, had subjected to their power all the cities
 which are situated in the Peloponnesus . Isocrates regards the Ionian Colonization as contemporaneous
 with the Dorian Conquest of the Peloponnesus . After this they were compelled to center their
 thoughts upon their own interests. What, then, is the good which has resulted from the war which we waged and the trouble
 which we took in the colonization of the Hellenes? For this is, I think, a question which
 the majority would very much like to have answered. Well, the result was that the Hellenes
 found it easier to obtain subsistence and enjoyed a greater degree of concord after they
 had been relieved of so great a number of the class of people which I have described; that
 the barbarians were driven forth from their own territory and humbled in their pride; and
 that those who had brought these conditions to pass gained the fame and the name of having
 made Hellas twice as strong as she was of old.
 I could not, then, point out a greater service than this, rendered by our ancestors, nor
 one more generally beneficial to the Hellenes. But I shall, perhaps, be able to show one
 more particularly related to their conduct of war, and, at the same time, no less
 admirable and more manifest to all. For who does not himself know or has not heard from
 the tragic poets See Aesch.
 Seven ; Soph. Ant. ; Eur.
 Phoen. at the Dionysia of the misfortunes which befell Adrastus Compare the treatment of the Adrastus episode in Isoc. 4.54 ff. at Thebes , how in his desire to restore to power the son of Oedipus, his own son-in-law, he lost a
 great number of his Argive soldiers in the battle
 and saw all of his captains slain, though saving his own life in dishonor, and, when he
 failed to obtain a truce and was unable to recover the bodies of his dead for burial, he
 came as a suppliant to Athens, while Theseus still ruled the city, and implored the
 Athenians not to suffer such men to be deprived of sepulture nor to allow ancient custom
 and immemorial law to be set at naught—that ordinance which all men respect without fail,
 not as having been instituted by our human nature, but as having been enjoined by the
 divine power? See Isoc. 4.55 ,
 note. 
 When our people heard this plea, they let no time go by but at once dispatched
 ambassadors to Thebes to advise her people
 that they be more reverent in their deliberations regarding the recovery of the dead and
 that they render a decision which would be more lawful than that which they had previously
 made, and to hint to them also that the Athenians would not countenance their
 transgression of the common law of all Hellas .