Greek Texts & Translations

However, although the laws regarding citizenship and the steps that must be taken before one may become an Athenian are so admirably and so securely established, there is yet another law which has been enacted in addition to all these, and this law is of paramount validity; such great precautions have the people taken in the interest of themselves and of the gods, to the end that the sacrifices on the state's behalf may be offered in conformity with religious usage. For in the case of all those whom the Athenian people may make citizens, the law expressly forbids that they should be eligible to the office of the nine archons or to hold any priesthood; but their descendants are allowed by the people to share in all civic rights, though the proviso is added: if they are born from an Athenian woman who was betrothed according to the law.

59.93That these statements of mine are true, I will prove to you by the clearest and most convincing testimony; but I wish first to go back to the origins of the law and to show how it came to be enacted and who those were whom its provisions covered as being men of worth who had shown themselves staunch friends to the people of Athens. For from all this you will know that the people's gift which is reserved for benefactors is being dragged through the mire, and how great the privileges are which are being taken from your control by this fellow Stephanus and those who have married and begotten children in the manner followed by him.

59.94The Plataeans, men of Athens, alone among the Greeks came to your aid at Marathon ^note when Datis, the general of King Dareius, on his return from Eretria ^note after subjugating Euboea, landed on our coast with a large force and proceeded to ravage the country. And even to this day the picture in the Painted Stoa ^note exhibits the memorial of their valor; for each man is portrayed hastening to your aid with all speed—they are the band wearing Boeotian caps. 59.95And again, when Xerxes came against Greece and the Thebans went over to the side of the Medes, the Plataeans refused to withdraw from their alliance with us, but, unsupported by any others of the Boeotians, half of them arrayed themselves in Thermopylae against the advancing barbarian together with the Lacedaemonians and Leonidas, and perished with them; and the remainder embarked on your triremes, since they had no ships of their own, and fought along with you in the naval battles at Artemisium ^note and at Salamis. 59.96And they fought together with you and the others who were seeking to save the freedom of Greece in the final battle at Plataea against Mardonius, the King's general, and deposited the liberty thus secured as a common prize for all the Greeks. And when Pausanias, the king of the Lacedaemonians, sought to put an insult upon you, and was not content that the Lacedaemonians had been honored by the Greeks with the supreme command, and when your city, which in reality had been the leader in securing liberty for the Greeks, forbore to strive with the Lacedaemonians as rivals for the honor through fear of arousing jealousy among the allies; 59.97Pausanias, the king of the Lacedaemonians, puffed up by this, inscribed a distich upon the tripod at Delphi, which the Greeks who had jointly fought in the battle at Plataea and in the sea-fight at Salamis had made in common from the spoils taken from the barbarians, and had set up in honor of Apollo as a memorial of their valor. The distich ^note was as follows: Pausanias, supreme commander of the Greeks, when he had destroyed the host of the Medes,
dedicated to Phoebus this memorial.

He wrote thus, as if the achievement and the offering had been his own and not the common work of the allies;