Plataea
In 520 BC Plataea, unwilling to submit to the supremacy of Thebes, and unable to resist this powerful neighbour with its own resources, sought the protection of Sparta.
[6] When the Persian king Dareios sent an armada to invade Attica in 490 BC, Plataea sent 1,000 men to join Athens at the Battle of Marathon, and shared in the glories of that victory.
They were admitted within the walls during the night by members of a faction partial to Thebes, but the Plataeans soon discovered the attack and engaged the invaders.
Yet this small force defied the whole army of the Peloponnesians, which, after many fruitless attempts to take the city, gave up the assault and converted the siege into a blockade.
After a "trial" by the Spartans, in which their arguments against the unwarranted assault on the city were shunted aside, they were put to death and all private buildings were razed to the ground by the Thebans.
The people of Scione, in the Chalcidice, had revolted about this time, and while Sparta claimed it was before the truce, Athens had intelligence that it took place afterward.
[17] The exiled Plataeans continued to live at Athens until the imposition Peace of Antalcidas by the Great King of Persia (387 BC), which guaranteed the autonomy of all Greek cities.
In the 370s, Athens and Thebes went to war against Sparta, and the Lacedaemonians used Thespiae and Plataea as staging areas for a series of incursions into Boeotia to ravage the Theban countryside.
In 375 BC Sparta was too busy with other campaigns to send forces to the area and Thebes took the opportunity to compel these cities back into the Boeotian Federation.
At some point – the year is reported variously as 373, 372, and 371 BC by ancient sources – they reached out to Athens in an attempt to restore the long-standing alliance between the two cities.
[20] For the next two decades Thebes reigned supreme in Greece, until the rise of Macedon and the campaign of Philip II to extend its hegemony throughout the region.
At the last minute Thebes, which had been in league with Macedon for years, switched sides and fought with Athens against him and his son Alexander at Chaeroneia, in northern Boeotia.
[24] It is probable that the old temple of Hera mentioned by Herodotus, and which he described as outside the city,[25] was no longer repaired after the erection of the new one, and had disappeared before Pausanias' visit.
[30] Plataea is featured in the 2nd-century AD Latin novel Metamorphoses (often called The Golden Ass) by Apuleius, in which it is depicted as hosting gladiatorial combat and an array of wild beasts.
More information can be found at https://eternalgreece.com/ancient-plataea/ There are several references to a special relationship between Plataeans and Athenians, though the exact nature of it is disputed by scholars.
"[33] Diodorus Siculus, in describing a later event, says: "The Plataeans with their wives and children, having fled to Athens, received equality of civic rights (isopoliteia) as a mark of favour from the Athenian people".
[34] Aristophanes, in his Frogs (693-4) has the Chorus opine, "For it is disgraceful for men who have fought one battle by sea to become Plataeans straightway and masters instead of slaves".
A scholiast to this passage appended this: "Hellanicus says that the slaves who joined in the sea battle were given their freedom and were enrolled as joint-citizens (sympoliteysasthai) with the Athenians on the same terms as the Plataeans".
During this oration, he had the clerk read out a previously enacted degree regarding the Plataeans that had been passed during their exile in 429 BC:On motion of Hippocrates it is decreed that the Plataeans shall be Athenians from this day, and shall have full rights as citizens, and that they shall share in all the privileges in which the Athenians share, both civil and religious, save any priesthood or religious office which belongs to a particular family, and that they shall not be eligible to the office of the nine archons but their descendants shall be.
[36]If this is a true representation of the decree (and its wording has been challenged in modern times[37]), it would seem that the status did not apply to all Plataeans forever, but only to those individuals who were specifically honored and their children.
Based on the several references to separate grants of citizenship, it is probable that these honors were bestowed multiple times over the years to succeeding generations of Plataean exiles.
