Thus the struggles at the Peiraeus have earned for those men the envy of all mankind. But it is right that we should also praise the strangers who lie here: they came to the support of the people, and fought for our salvation; they regarded valor as their native land,As aliens, they were stirred by love of valor rather than patriotism. and with this noble end they closed their lives. In return the city has not only mourned them but given them a public funeral, and has granted them in perpetuity the same honors as it gives to its own people.

The men who are being buried today went to support the Corinthians, who were wronged by ancient friends, while they were but new allies; they did not act in the same spirit as the Lacedaemonians (who envied the Corinthians their wealth, whereas our men pitied them for their wrongs, unmindful of their former enmity and regardful of their present friendship), but showed forth their own valor in the sight of all men.

To enhance the greatness of Greece they had the courage, not merely to imperil themselves for their own preservation, but also to die for their enemies’ freedom: for they fought the allies of the Lacedaemonians for the freedom of those allies. Had they conquered, they deemed their foes worthy of obtaining equal rights: in their misfortune they settled an inheritance of slavery on the peoples of the Peloponnese.The Athenian’s object in these operations was to check the expansive policy of Sparta by striking at her allies in the Peloponnese. Corinth was the center of the struggle.

Now in such a plight as theirs, life was miserable, death desirable. But these men, both in their life and after their death, are enviable; for they were first trained in the excellences of their ancestors, and then in manhood they preserved that ancient fame intact and displayed their own prowess.

For the benefits that they have conferred on their own native land are many and splendid; they restored the broken fortunes of others, and kept the war at a distance from their own country.I.e., in the territory of Corinth. They have closed their lives with a death that befits true men, for thus they repaid their native land for their nurture and bequeathed sorrow to those who reared them.