6
They stood alone in failing to learn from their mistakes, and so to be better advised in their future actions; they would not return home and report their own misfortune and our ancestors’ valor: for they perished on the spot, and were punished for their folly, thus making our city’s memory imperishable for its valor; while owing to their disaster in this region they rendered their own country nameless. And so those women, by their unjust greed for others’ land, justly lost their own.
7
When AdrastusKing of Argos, and father-in-law of Polyneices, who went with him on the expedition against Thebes, the city of the Cadmeans, to claim the throne held there by Creon. and Polyneices had marched against Thebes and had been vanquished in battle, and the Cadmeans would not allow the corpses to be buried, the Athenians decided that, if those men had done some wrong, they had paid by their death the heaviest penalty, while the gods below were not obtaining their dues, and by the pollution of the shrines the gods above were being treated with impiety: so first they sent heralds and requested permission to take up the corpses,
8
considering it to be the duty of brave men to take vengeance on their enemies while they lived, but a mark of self-distrust to display their valor over the bodies of the dead. When they failed to obtain this, they marched against them: no previous quarrel subsisted between them and the Cadmeans, nor did they wish to gratify the Argives who were yet living;
