And if a person desired to bring a deserved accusation against our city, he
would find only one charge which he could justly urge--that she was too
compassionate and too favourable to the weaker side. And in this instance
she was not able to hold out or keep her resolution of refusing aid to her
injurers when they were being enslaved, but she was softened, and did in
fact send out aid, and delivered the Hellenes from slavery, and they were
free until they afterwards enslaved themselves. Whereas, to the great king
she refused to give the assistance of the state, for she could not forget
the trophies of Marathon and Salamis and Plataea; but she allowed exiles
and volunteers to assist him, and they were his salvation. And she
herself, when she was compelled, entered into the war, and built walls and
ships, and fought with the Lacedaemonians on behalf of the Parians. Now
the king fearing this city and wanting to stand aloof, when he saw the
Lacedaemonians growing weary of the war at sea, asked of us, as the price
of his alliance with us and the other allies, to give up the Hellenes in
Asia, whom the Lacedaemonians had previously handed over to him, he
thinking that we should refuse, and that then he might have a pretence for
withdrawing from us. About the other allies he was mistaken, for the
Corinthians and Argives and Boeotians, and the other states, were quite
willing to let them go, and swore and covenanted, that, if he would pay
them money, they would make over to him the Hellenes of the continent, and
we alone refused to give them up and swear. Such was the natural nobility
of this city, so sound and healthy was the spirit of freedom among us, and
the instinctive dislike of the barbarian, because we are pure Hellenes,
having no admixture of barbarism in us. For we are not like many others,
descendants of Pelops or Cadmus or Egyptus or Danaus, who are by nature
barbarians, and yet pass for Hellenes, and dwell in the midst of us; but we
are pure Hellenes, uncontaminated by any foreign element, and therefore the
hatred of the foreigner has passed unadulterated into the life-blood of the