[434] See this point emphatically set forth in Orat. xiv, called Λόγος Πλαταϊκὸς, of Isokratês, p. 308, sect. 62.
The whole of that oration is interesting to be read in illustration of the renewed sufferings of the Platæans near fifty years after this capture.
[435] Thucyd. iii, 54-59. Dionysius of Halikarnassus bestows especial commendation on the speech of the Platæan orator (De Thucyd. Hist. Judic. p. 921). Concurring with him as to its merits, I do not concur in the opinion which he expresses that it is less artistically put together than those other harangues which he considers inferior.
Mr. Mitford doubts whether these two orations are to be taken as approximating to anything really delivered on the occasion. But it seems to me that the means possessed by Thucydidês for informing himself of what was actually said at this scene before the captured Platæa must have been considerable and satisfactory: I therefore place full confidence in them, as I do in most of the other harangues in his work, so far as _the substance_ goes.
The Theban speakers contended that the Platæans had deserved, and brought upon themselves by their own fault, the enmity of Thebes,—that they had stood forward earnestly against the Persians, only because Athens had done so too, and that all the merit, whatever it might be, which they had thereby acquired, was counterbalanced and cancelled by their having allied themselves with Athens afterwards for the oppression and enslavement of the Æginetans, and of other Greeks equally conspicuous for zeal against Xerxes, and equally entitled to protection under the promises of Pausanias. The Thebans went on to vindicate their nocturnal surprise of Platæa, by maintaining that they had been invited by the most respectable citizens of the town,[436] who were anxious only to bring back Platæa from its alliance with a stranger to its natural Bœotian home,—and that they had abstained from anything like injurious treatment of the inhabitants, until constrained to use force in their own defence. They then reproached the Platæans, in their turn, with that breach of faith whereby ultimately the Theban prisoners in the town had been put to death. And while they excused their alliance with Xerxes, at the time of the Persian invasion, by affirming that Thebes was then under a dishonest party-oligarchy, who took this side for their own factious purposes, and carried the people with them by force,—they at the same time charged the Platæans with permanent treason against the Bœotian customs and brotherhood.[437] All this was farther enforced by setting forth the claims of Thebes to the gratitude of Lacedæmon, both for having brought Bœotia into the Lacedæmonian alliance, at the time of the battle of Korôneia, and for having furnished so large a portion of the common force in the war then going on.[438]
