Against Leocrates (45-49)

You would do well to remember this and punish with death this man who did not even deign to help collect the bodies or attend the funeral of those who at Chaeronea died for freedom and the safety of our people; for had it rested with him those men would be unburied. He was not even ashamed to pass their graves when he greeted their country eight years after.

I wish to say a few words more about these men, gentlemen, and I ask you to listen and not regard such pleas as out of keeping with public trials. For the praise of brave men provides an unanswerable refutation of all whose conduct is opposed to theirs. And it is fair too that that praise which is to them the only reward for danger should be remembered at the public trials in which the entire city shares, since it was for her safety as a whole that they forfeited their lives.

Those men encountered the enemy on the borders of Boeotia, to fight for the freedom of Greece. They neither rested their hopes of safety on city walls nor surrendered their lands for the foe to devastate. Believing that their own courage was a surer protection than battlements of stone, they held it a disgrace to see the land that reared them wasted. And they were right. Men do not hold their foster parents so dear as their own fathers, and so towards countries which are not their own but which have been adopted during their lifetime they feel a weaker loyalty.

In such a spirit did these men bear their share of dangers with a courage unsurpassed; but their prowess was not equalled by their fortune. For they have not lived to reap the enjoyment of their valor; they died and have bequeathed their glory in its stead. Unconquered, they fell at their posts in the defence of freedom,

and if I may use a paradox but one which yet conveys the truth, they triumphed in their death. For liberty and courage, the prizes offered to brave men in war, are both in the possession of the dea neither can we say that men have been defeated whose spirits did not flinch at the aggressor’s threat. For it is only those who meet an honorable end in war whom no man justly could call beaten, since by the choosing of a noble death they are escaping slavery. The courage of these men has made this plain. They alone among us all held in their persons the liberty of Greece.