The Melians responded by saying that people facing death or slavery often have dreams of salvation. The Athenians said that the Melians would do well to worry about the present and not borrow trouble worrying about the future. The Melians said that they understood that they had two chances: slim and none and that the outcome of the talk would be that they were to be slaves or to be dead.

We are here to ask you people some questions to which you had better give the correct answers. So, the Athenians said, we are not here to deliver any sort of speech. The Athenians said that they knew why the Melian leaders would not let the Athenians talk to the whole populace it was because the people would see that they were hopelessly outnumbered, and that they had no chance. The Athenians maintained that it was not their intent to ravage the island instead they wanted to court its allegiance to their cause hence, before the Athenians devastated the island, they talked to the Melians. In 416 b.c., an Athenian fleet augmented by allies from Chios and Lesbos attacked the people on the island of Melos. The story of Melos is a melancholy footnote in mankind's tragic history. It is my hope that any reader might take himself or herself to Thucydides' book itself for the wisdom and pathos it exhibits. The story of tiny Melos, related by Thucydides in his Peloponnesian War, may be compressed in American English into a précis, which is my simple intent. These colonists, who were governed by an oligarchy, had steadfastly tried to maintain their neutrality during the struggle to the death between the two great powers of Athens and Sparta. When Plato was a child, the war into which he had been born turned its brazen face to the insignificant little island of Melos, which had been colonized by Spartan colonists who, by definition, owed their allegiance to Sparta.

Thucydides peloponnesian war sparknotes