THE 3rd PHILIPPIC
by Demosthenes
341 B.C.
translated by J. H. Vince
INTRODUCTION by Thomas Leland, D.D
THE former oration (The Oration on the State of the Chersonesus) has its effect: for, instead of punishing Diopithes, the Athenians supplied him with money, in order to put him in a condition of continuing his expeditions. In the mean time Philip pursued his Thracian conquests, and made himself master of several places, which, though of little importance in themselves, yet opened him a way to the cities of the Propontis, and, above all, to Byzantium, which he had always intended to annex to his dominions. He at first tried the way of negotiation, in order to gain the Byzantines into the number of his allies; but this proving ineffectual, he resolved to proceed in another manner. He had a party in the city at whose head was the orator Python, that engaged to deliver him up one of the gates: but while he was on his march towards the city the conspiracy was discovered, which immediately determined him to take another route. His sudden countermarch, intended to conceal the crime of Python, really served to confirm it. He was brought to trial; but the credit and the presents of Philip prevailed to save him.
The efforts of the Athenians to support their interests in Euboea, and the power which Philip had acquired there, and which every day increased, had entirely destroyed the tranquillity of this island. The people of Oreum, divided by the Athenian and Macedonian factions, were on the point of breaking out into a civil war, when, under pretence of restoring their peace, Philip sent them a body of a thousand troops, under the command of Hipponicus; which soon determined the superiority to his side. Philistides, a tyrant, who had grown old in factions and public contests, was entrusted with the government of Oreum, which he administered with all possible severity and cruelty to those in the Athenian interest; while the other states of the island were also subjected to other Macedonian governors. Callias, the Chalcidian, whose inconstancy had made him espouse the interests of Athens, of Thebes, and Macedon, successively, now returned to his engagements with Athens. He sent deputies thither to desire assistance, and to prevail on the Athenians to make some vigorous attempt to regain their power in Euboea.
In the mean time the King of Persia, alarmed by the accounts of Philip's growing power, made use of all the influence which his gold could gain at Athens to engage the Athenians to act openly against an enemy equally suspected by them both. This circumstance perhaps disposed them to give the greater attention to the following oration.
THE THIRD PHILIPPIC
Produced in the Archonship of Sosigenes, two years after the Second Philippic
Many speeches are delivered, men of Athens, at almost every meeting of the Assembly, about the wrongs that Philip has been committing, ever since the conclusion of peace, not only against you but also against the other states, and all the speakers would, I am sure, admit in theory, though they do not put it in practice, that the object both of our words and deeds must be to check and chastise his arrogance; yet I perceive that all our interests have been so completely betrayed and sacrificed, that--I am afraid it is an ominous thing to say, but yet the truth--even if all who address you had wanted to propose, and all of you had wanted to pass, measures that were bound to bring our affairs into the worst possible plight, I do not think they could have been in a worse condition than they are today.
[2] Perhaps, indeed, this condition of our affairs may be attributed to many causes and not just to one or two, but a careful examination will convince you that it is above all due to those who study to win your favour rather than to give you the best advice. Some of them, Athenians, interested in maintaining a system which brings them credit and influence, have no thought for the future [and therefore think you should have none either]; while others, by blaming and traducing those in authority, make it their sole aim that our city shall concentrate her attention on punishing her own citizens, while Philip shall be free to say and do whatever he pleases.
[3] But such methods of dealing with public affairs, familiar though they are to you, are the cause of your calamities. I claim for myself, Athenians, that if I utter some home-truths with freedom, I shall not thereby incur your displeasure. For look at it this way. In other matters you think it is so necessary to grant general freedom of speech to everyone in Athens that you even allow aliens and slaves to share in the privilege, and many more menials may be observed among you speaking their minds with more liberty than citizens enjoy in other states; but from your deliberations you have banished it utterly.
[4] Hence the result is that in the Assembly your self-complacency is flattered by hearing none but pleasant speeches, but your policy and your practice are already involving you in the gravest peril. Therefore, if such is your temper now, I have nothing to say; but if, apart from flattery, you are willing to hear something to your advantage, I am ready to speak. For though the state of our affairs is in every way deplorable, and though much has been sacrificed, nevertheless it is possible, if you choose to do your duty, that all may yet be repaired.
[5] And what I am going to say may perhaps seem a paradox, but it is true. The worst feature of the past is our best hope for the future. What, then, is that feature? It is that your affairs go wrong because you neglect every duty, great or small; since surely, if they were in this plight in spite of your doing all that was required, there would not be even a hope of improvement. But in fact it is your indifference and carelessness that Philip has conquered; your city he has not conquered. Nor have you been defeated--no! you have not even made a move.
[6] [If, then, we were all agreed that Philip is at war with Athens and is violating the peace, the only task of a speaker would be to come forward and recommend the safest and easiest method of defence; but since some of you are in such a strange mood that, though Philip is seizing cities, and retaining many of your possessions, and inflicting injury on everybody, you tolerate some speakers who repeatedly assert in the Assembly that the real aggressors are certain of ourselves, we must be on our guard and set this matter right.
[7] For there is grave danger that anyone who proposes and urges that we shall defend ourselves may incur the charge of having provoked the war. I therefore first of all state and define this question--whether it is in our power to discuss the alternative of peace or war.]1
[8] If indeed Athens can remain at peace and if the choice rests with us-- to take that point first--I personally feel that we are bound to do so; and if anyone says that we can, I call upon him to move a resolution and to do something and to play us no tricks; but if there is another person concerned, with sword in hand and a mighty force at his back, who imposes on you with the name of peace but himself indulges in acts of war, what is left but to defend ourselves? If you choose to follow his example and profess that you are at peace, I raise no objection.
[9] But if anyone mistakes for peace an arrangement which will enable Philip, when he has seized everything else, to march upon us, he has taken leave of his senses, and the peace that he talks of is one that you observe towards Philip, but not Philip towards you. That is the advantage which he is purchasing by all his expenditure of money--that he should be at war with you, but that you should not be at war with him.
[10] If we are going to wait for him to acknowledge a state of war with us, we are indeed the simplest of mortals; for even if he marches straight against Attica and the Piraeus, he will not admit it, if we may judge from his treatment of the other states.
[11] For take the case of the Olynthians; when he was five miles from their city, he told them there must be one of two things, either they must cease to reside in Olynthus, or he in Macedonia, though on all previous occasions, when accused of hostile intentions, he indignantly sent ambassadors to justify his conduct. Again, when he was marching against the Phocians, he still pretended that they were his allies, and Phocian ambassadors accompanied him on his march, and most people here at Athens contended that his passage through Thermopylae2 would be anything but a gain to the Thebans.
[12] And then again quite lately, after entering Thessaly as a friend and ally, he seized Pherae and still retains it; and lastly, he informed those poor wretches, the people of Oreus, that he had sent his soldiers to pay them a visit of sympathy in all goodwill, for he understood that they were suffering from acute internal trouble, and it was the duty of true friends and allies to be at their side on such occasions.
[13] And do you imagine that, while in the case of those who could have inflicted no harm, though they might perhaps have protected themselves against it, he preferred to deceive them rather than to crush them after due warning, in your case he will give warning of hostilities, especially when you are so eager to be deceived?
[14] Impossible! For indeed he would be the most fatuous man on earth if, when you, his victims, charge him with no crime, but throw the blame on some of your own fellow-citizens, he should compose your mutual differences and jealousies, and invite you to turn them against himself, and should deprive his own hirelings of the excuses with which they put you off, saying that at any rate it is not Philip who is making war on Athens.
[15] But, in heaven's name, is there any intelligent man who would let words rather than deeds decide the question who is at peace and who is at war with him? Surely no one. Now it was Philip who at the very start, as soon as peace was concluded, before Diopithes was appointed general, before the force now in the Chersonese had been dispatched, proceeded to occupy Serrium and Doriscus and expelled from the Fort Serreum and the Sacred Mount the garrison which your own general had posted there.
[16] Yet what did that move of his mean? For it was peace that he had sworn3 to observe; and let no one say, “What of all this? How do any of these things concern Athens?” For whether they were small things, or whether they were no concern of yours, may be another question. But religion and justice, whether a man violates them in a small matter or in a great, have the same importance. Tell me now: when he sends mercenaries to the Chersonese, your claim to which has been recognized by the king of Persia and by all the Greeks, when he admits that he is helping the Cardians and writes to tell you so, what does he mean? For he says that he is not at war,
[17] but for my part, so far from admitting that in acting thus he is not observing the peace with you, I assert that when he lays hands on Megara, sets up tyrannies in Euboea, makes his way, as now, into Thrace, hatches plots in the Peloponnese, and carries out all operations with his armed force, he is breaking the peace and making war upon you--unless you are prepared to say that men who bring up the siege-engines are keeping the peace until they actually bring them to bear on the walls. But you will not admit that; for he who makes and devises the means by which I may be captured is at war with me, even though he has not yet hurled a javelin or shot a bolt.
[18] In what then consists your danger, if anything should happen? In the alienation of the Hellespont, in the control of Megara and Euboea by one who is at war with you, and in the defection of the Peloponnesians to his side. Am I still to say that the man who brings this siege-engine to bear on your city is at peace with you?
[19] So far from saying that, I date his hostility from the very day when he wiped out the Phocians. I say that you will be wise if you defend yourselves now, but if you let the opportunity pass, you will not be able to act even when you desire to. I so far dissent, Athenians, from all you counsellors that I do not think you ought to trouble yourselves now about the Chersonese or Byzantium.
[20] Help them, if you will, guard them from harm [supply the troops already there with all that they require], but let your deliberations embrace all the Greek states and the great danger that besets them. But I wish to tell you the grounds for my alarm about our condition, so that if my reasoning is sound, you may adopt it as your own and take forethought for yourselves, even if you refuse to take it for the others also; but if I seem to you a driveler and a dotard, neither now nor at any other time pay any heed to me as if I were in my senses.
[21] As for the fact, then, that Philip rose to greatness from small and humble beginnings, that the Greek states are mutually disloyal and factious, and that the increase of Philip's power in the past was a far greater miracle than the completion of his conquests now that he has already gained so much, these and all such topics on which I might expatiate, I will pass over in silence.
[22] I observe, however, that all men, and you first of all, have conceded to him something which has been the occasion of every war that the Greeks have ever waged. And what is that? The power of doing what he likes, of calmly plundering and stripping the Greeks one by one, and of attacking their cities and reducing them to slavery.
[23] Yet your hegemony in Greece lasted seventy-five years, that of Sparta twenty-nine, and in these later times Thebes too gained some sort of authority after the battle of Leuctra. But neither to you nor to the Thebans nor to the Lacedaemonians did the Greeks ever yet, men of Athens, concede the right of unrestricted action, or anything like it.
[24] On the contrary, when you, or rather the Athenians of that day, were thought to be showing a want of consideration in dealing with others, all felt it their duty, even those who had no grievance against them, to go to war in support of those who had been injured; and again, when the Lacedaemonians had risen to power and succeeded to your position of supremacy, and when they set to work to encroach on others and interfered unduly with the established order of things, all the Greeks were up in arms, even those who had no grievance of their own.
[25] Why need I refer to the other states? Nay, we ourselves and the Lacedaemonians, though at the outset we could not have specified any wrong at each other's hands, thought it our duty to fight on account of wrongs which we saw the other states suffering. Yet all the faults committed by the Lacedaemonians in those thirty years, and by our ancestors in their seventy years of supremacy, are fewer, men of Athens, than the wrongs which Philip has done to the Greeks in the thirteen incomplete years in which he has been coming to the top--or rather, they are not a fraction of them.
[26] [And this is easily proved by a short calculation.] I pass over Olynthus and Methone and Apollonia and the two and thirty cities in or near Thrace, all of which Philip has destroyed so ruthlessly that a traveler would find it hard to say whether they had ever been inhabited. I say nothing of the destruction of the important nation of the Phocians. But how stands the case of the Thessalians? Has he not robbed them of their free constitutions and of their very cities, setting up tetrarchies in order to enslave them, not city by city, but tribe by tribe?
[27] Are not tyrannies already established in Euboea, an island, remember, not far from Thebes and Athens? Does he not write explicitly in his letters, “I am at peace with those who are willing to obey me”? And he does not merely write this without putting it into practice; but he is off to the Hellespont, just as before he hurried to Ambracia; in the Peloponnese he occupies the important city of Elis; only the other day he intrigued against the Megarians. Neither the Greek nor the barbarian world is big enough for the fellow's ambition.
[28] And we Greeks see and hear all this, and yet we do not send embassies to one another and express our indignation. We are in such a miserable position, we have so entrenched ourselves in our different cities, that to this very day we can do nothing that our interest or our duty demands; we cannot combine, we cannot take any common pledge of help or friendship;
[29] but we idly watch the growing power of this man, each bent (or so it seems to me) on profiting by the interval afforded by another's ruin, taking not a thought, making not an effort for the salvation of Greece. For that Philip, like the recurrence or attack of a fever or some other disease, is threatening even those who think themselves out of reach, of that not one of you is ignorant.
[30] Ay, and you know this also, that the wrongs which the Greeks suffered from the Lacedaemonians or from us, they suffered at all events at the hands of true-born sons of Greece, and they might have been regarded as the acts of a legitimate son, born to great possessions, who should be guilty of some fault or error in the management of his estate: so far he would deserve blame and reproach, yet it could not be said that it was not one of the blood, not the lawful heir who was acting thus.
[31] But if some slave or superstitious bastard had wasted and squandered what he had no right to, heavens! how much more monstrous and exasperating all would have called it! Yet they have no such qualms about Philip and his present conduct, though he is not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honor, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave.
[32] Yet what is wanting to crown his insolence? Not content with the destruction of cities, is he not organizing the Pythian games, the common festival of the Greeks, and if he cannot be present in person, sending his menials to act as stewards? [Is he not master of Thermopylae and the passes into Greece, holding those places with his garrisons and his mercenaries? Has he not the right of precedence at the Oracle, ousting us and the Thessalians and the Dorians and the rest of the Amphictyons from a privilege which not even all Greek states can claim?]
[33] Does he not dictate to the Thessalians their form of government? Does he not send mercenaries, some to Porthmus to expel the Eretrian democracy, others to Oreus to set up the tyranny of Philistides? Yet the Greeks see all this and suffer it. They seem to watch him just as they would watch a hailstorm, each praying that it may not come their way, but none making any effort to stay its course.
[34] And it is not only his outrages on Greece that go unavenged, but even the wrongs which each suffers separately. For nothing can go beyond that. Are not the Corinthians hit by his invasion of Ambracia and Leucas? The Achaeans by his vow to transfer Naupactus to the Aetolians? The Thebans by his theft of Echinus? And is he not marching even now against his4 allies the Byzantines?
[35] Of our own possessions, not to mention other places, is he not holding Cardia, the greatest city in the Chersonese? In spite of such treatment, we hesitate one and all, we play the coward, we keep an eye on our neighbors, distrusting one another rather than our common foe. Yet if he treats us all with such brutality, what do you think he will do when he has got each of us separately into his clutches?
[36] What then is the cause of this? For not without reason, not without just cause, the Greeks of old were as eager for freedom as their descendants today are for slavery. There was something, men of Athens, something which animated the mass of the Greeks but which is lacking now, something which triumphed over the wealth of Persia, which upheld the liberties of Hellas, which never lost a single battle by sea or land, something the decay of which has ruined everything and brought our affairs to a state of chaos. And what was that?
[37] [It was nothing recondite or subtle, but simply that] men who took bribes from those who wished to rule Greece or ruin her, were hated by all, and it was the greatest calamity to be convicted of receiving a bribe, and such a man was punished with the utmost severity [and no intercession, no pardon was allowed].
[38] At each crisis, therefore, the opportunity for action, with which fortune often equips the careless against the vigilant [and those who shrink from deeds against those who fulfil their duties], could not be bought at a price from our politicians or our generals; no, nor our mutual concord, nor our distrust of tyrants and barbarians, nor, in a word, any such advantage.
[39] Now, however, all these things have been sold in open market, and in place of them we have imported vices which have infected Greece with a mortal sickness. And what are those vices? Envy of the man who has secured his gains; contempt for him who confesses; [pardon for those who are convicted;] hatred for him who censures such dealings; and every other vice that goes hand in hand with corruption.
[40] For war-galleys, men in abundance, money and material without stint, everything by which one might gauge the strength of our cities, these we as a body possess today in number and quantity far beyond the Greeks of former times. But all our resources are rendered useless, powerless, worthless by these traffickers.
[41] That this is so, you surely see for yourselves with regard to the present, and you need no evidence of mine, but that it was the opposite in the days of old I will prove, not in my own words, but by the written record of your ancestors, which they engraved on a bronze pillar and set up in the Acropolis. [It was not for their own use, for without these documents their instinct was right; but it was that you might have these examples to remind you that such cases ought to be regarded seriously.]
[42] “Arthmius of Zelea,” it says, “son of Pythonax, outlaw and enemy of the people of Athens and of their allies, himself and his family.” Then is recorded the reason for this punishment: “because he conveyed the gold of the Medes to the Peloponnese.” So runs the inscription.
[43] I earnestly implore you to consider what was the intention of the Athenians who did this thing, or what was their proud claim. They proscribed as their enemy and the enemy of their allies, disfranchising him and his family, a man of Zelea, one Arthmius, a slave of the Great King (for Zelea is in Asia), because in the service of his master he conveyed gold, not to Athens but to the Peloponnese.5
[44] This was not outlawry as commonly understood; for what mattered it to a native of Zelea if he was to be debarred from a share in the common rights of Athenian citizens? But the statutes relating to murder provide for cases where prosecution for murder is not allowed [but where it is a righteous act to slay the murderer]; “and he shall die an outlaw,” says the legislator. This simply means that anyone slaying a member of Arthmius's family would be free from blood-guilt.
[45] So our ancestors thought that they were bound to consider the welfare of all Greeks, for except on that assumption bribery and corruption in the Peloponnese would be no concern of theirs; and in chastising and punishing all whom they detected, they went so far as to set the offenders' names on a pillar. The natural result was that the Greek power was dreaded by the barbarian, not the barbarian by the Greeks. But that is no longer so. For that is not your attitude towards these and other offences. What then is your attitude?
[46] [You know it yourselves. For why should you bear the whole blame, when all the other Greeks are just as bad as you? That is why I assert that the present crisis calls for earnest zeal and wise counsel. What counsel?]6 Do you want me to tell you, and will you promise not to be angry?[He reads from an official record]7
[47] Now there is a foolish argument advanced by those who want to reassure the citizens. Philip, they say, after all is not yet what the Lacedaemonians were; they were masters of every sea and land; they enjoyed the alliance of the king of Persia; nothing could stand against them: and yet our city defended itself even against them and was not overwhelmed. But for my own part, while practically all the arts have made a great advance and we are living today in a very different world from the old one, I consider that nothing has been more revolutionized and improved than the art of war.
[48] For in the first place I am informed that in those days the Lacedaemonians, like everyone else, would spend the four or five months of the summer “season” in invading and laying waste the enemy's territory with heavy infantry and levies of citizens, and would then retire home again; and they were so old-fashioned, or rather such good citizens,8 that they never used money to buy an advantage from anyone, but their fighting was of the fair and open kind.
[49] But now you must surely see that most disasters are due to traitors, and none are the result of a regular pitched battle. On the other hand you hear of Philip marching unchecked, not because he leads a phalanx of heavy infantry, but because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries, and similar troops.
[50] When, relying on this force, he attacks some people that is at variance with itself, and when through distrust no one goes forth to fight for his country, then he brings up his artillery and lays siege. I need hardly tell you that he makes no difference between summer and winter and has no season set apart for inaction.
[51] Since, however, you all know this, you must take it into account and not let the war pass into your own country; you must not invite catastrophe through keeping your eyes fixed on the simple strategy of your old war with the Lacedaemonians, but arrange your political affairs and your military preparations so that your line of defence may be as far away from Athens as possible, give him no chance of stirring from his base, and never come to close grips with him.
[52] For so far as a campaign is concerned, provided, men of Athens, we are willing to do what is necessary, we have many natural advantages, such as the nature of his territory, much of which may be harried and devastated, and countless others; but for a pitched battle he is in better training than we are.
[53] But it is not enough to adopt these suggestions, nor even to oppose him with active military measures, but both from calculation and on principle you must show your hatred of those who speak publicly on his behalf; and you must reflect that it is impossible to defeat the enemies of our city until you have chastised those who within our very walls make themselves their servants.
[54] And that, as all Heaven is my witness, you will never be able to do; but you have reached such a height of folly or of madness or--I know not what to call it, for this fear too has often haunted me, that some demon is driving you to your doom, that from love of calumny or envy or ribaldry, or whatever your motive may be, you clamor for a speech from these hirelings, some of whom would not even disclaim that title, and you derive amusement from their vituperations.
[55] This is serious enough, but there is worse to follow; for you have granted to these men more security for the pursuance of their policy than to your own defenders. Yet mark what troubles are in store for those who lend an ear to such counsellors. I will mention some facts which will be familiar to you all.
[56] At Olynthus there were two parties in the state: Philip's men, entirely subservient to him, and the patriots, striving to preserve the freedom of their countrymen. Which, pray, ruined their country? Which betrayed the cavalry, whose betrayal sealed the doom of Olynthus? The partisans of Philip; the men who, when the city was still standing, tried to defame and slander the patriotic statesmen, until the Olynthian democracy was actually induced to expel Apollonides.9
[57] Now it was not at Olynthus only that this habit produced every kind of evil result; but at Eretria, when the democrats, ridding themselves of Plutarchus and his mercenaries, held the city together with Porthmus, some of them were for handing the government over to you, others to Philip. The latter on most points, or rather on all, gained the ear of the sorely tried and ill-starred Eretrians, and at last persuaded them to expel their real champions.
[58] For of course Philip, whom they fancied their ally, sent Hipponicus with a thousand mercenaries, razed the walls of Porthmus, and set up three tyrants, Hipparchus, Automedon, and Clitarchus. Twice since then they have tried to deliver themselves, and twice he has driven them from their homes [on the first occasion sending Eurylochus with his mercenaries, on the second Parmenio].
[59] And what need is there to mention most of the cases? But at Oreus Philistides, Menippus, Socrates, Thoas, and Agapaeus, the very men who now control the city, were, as everyone knew, Philip's agents, but Euphraeus, a man who once resided here at Athens, was working for the freedom and emancipation of his countrymen.
[60] It would be a long story to tell you how this man was repeatedly outraged and insulted by the people; but a year before the capture of Eretria, detecting the machinations of Philistides and his party, he denounced him as a traitor. Then a number of fellows banded together, with Philip for their paymaster and managing director, and dragged Euphraeus off to prison for setting the city in an uproar.
[61] When the democrats of Oreus saw this, instead of rescuing him and knocking the others on the head, they showed no resentment against them and gloated over Euphraeus, saying that he deserved all he had got. Then having all the liberty of action they desired, they intrigued for the capture of the city and prepared to carry out their plot, while any of the common folk who saw what they were at were terrorized into silence, having the fate of Euphraeus before their eyes. And so abject was their condition that, with this danger looming ahead, no one dared to breathe a syllable until the enemy, having completed their preparations, were approaching the gates; and then some were for defence, the others for surrender.
[62] But since that base and shameful capture of the city, the latter have been its rulers and tyrants; those who sheltered them before, and had been ready to take any measures against Euphraeus, were rewarded with banishment or death; and the noble Euphraeus slew himself, giving thus a practical proof of the honesty and disinterested patriotism of his opposition to Philip.
[63] Perhaps you wonder why the people of Olynthus and Eretria and Oreus were more favorably inclined to Philip's advocates than to their own. The explanation is the same as at Athens, that the patriots, however much they desire it, cannot sometimes say anything agreeable, for they are obliged to consider the safety of the state; but the others by their very efforts to be agreeable are playing into Philip's hands. The patriots demanded a war-subsidy, the others denied its necessity; the patriots bade them fight on and mistrust Philip, the others bade them keep the peace, until they fell into the snare.
[64] Not to go into particulars, it is the same tale everywhere, one party speaking to please their audience, the other giving advice that would have ensured their safety. But at the last there were many things that the people were induced to concede, not as before for their own gratification nor through ignorance, but gradually yielding because they thought that their discomfiture was inevitable and complete.
[65] And, by Heaven, that is what I certainly fear will be your experience, when you count your chances and discover that there is nothing left for you to do. And yet I pray, Athenians, that such may not be the issue of events. Better to die a thousand times than pay court to Philip [and abandon any of your loyal counsellors.] A fine return the people of Oreus have gained for handing themselves over to Philip's friends and rejecting Euphraeus!
[66] A fine return the democrats of Eretria have gained for spurning your embassy and capitulating to Clitarchus! They are slaves, doomed to the whipping-post and the scaffold. A fine clemency he showed to the Olynthians, who voted Lasthenes their master of the horse and banished Apollonides!
[67] It is folly and cowardice to cherish such hopes, to follow ill counsel and refuse to perform any fraction of your duties, to lend an ear to the advocates of your enemies and imagine that your city is so great that no conceivable danger can befall it.
[68] Ay, and a disgrace too it is to have to say, when all is over, “Why! who would have thought it? For of course we ought to have done this or that, and not so and so.” Many things could be named by the Olynthians today, which would have saved them from destruction if only they had then foreseen them. Many could be named by the Orites, many by the Phocians, many by every ruined city.
[69] But of what use to them is that? While the vessel is safe, whether it be a large or a small one, then is the time for sailor and helmsman arid everyone in his turn to show his zeal and to take care that it is not capsized by anyone's malice or inadvertence; but when the sea has overwhelmed it, zeal is useless.
[70] So we too, Athenians, as long as we are safe, blessed with a very great city, ample advantages, and the fairest repute--what are we to do? Perhaps some of my hearers have long been eager to ask that question. I solemnly promise that I will answer it and will also move a resolution, for which you can vote if so disposed. To begin with ourselves, we must make provision for our defence, I mean with war-galleys, funds, and men; for even if all other states succumb to slavery, we surely must fight the battle of liberty.
[71] Then having completed all these preparations and made our purpose clear, we must lose no time in calling upon the other Greeks, and we must inform them by sending ambassadors [in every direction, to the Peloponnese, to Rhodes, to Chios, to the Great King--for even his interests are not unaffected if we prevent Philip from subduing the whole country--] so that if you win them over, you may have someone to share your dangers and your expenses when the time comes, or if not, that you may at least delay the course of events.
[72] For since the war is against an individual and not against the might of an organized community, even delay is not without its use; nor were those embassies useless which you sent round the Peloponnese last year to denounce Philip, when I and our good friend Polyeuctus here and Hegesippus and the rest went from city to city and succeeded in checking him, so that he never invaded Ambracia nor even started against the Peloponnese.
[73] I do not, however, suggest that you should invite the rest, unless you are ready to do for yourselves what is necessary; for it would be futile to abandon our own interests and pretend that we are protecting those of others, or to overlook the present dangers and alarm our neighbors with dangers to come. That is not my meaning. But I do contend that we must send supplies to the forces in the Chersonese and satisfy all their demands, and while we make preparation ourselves, we must summon, collect, instruct, and exhort the rest of the Greeks. That is the duty of a city with a reputation such as yours enjoys.
[74] But if you imagine that Greece will be saved by Chalcidians or Megarians, while you run away from the task, you are wrong. For they may think themselves lucky if they can save themselves separately. But this is a task for you; it was for you that your ancestors won this proud privilege and bequeathed it to you at great and manifold risk.
[75] But if every man sits idle, consulting his own pleasure and careful to avoid his own duty, not only will he find no one to do it for him, but I fear that those duties that we wish to shirk may all be forced upon us at once.
[76] These are my views and these are my proposals, and if they are carried out, I believe that even now we may retrieve our fortunes. If anyone has anything better to propose, let him speak and advise. But whatever you decide, I pray heaven it may be to your advantage.
NOTES
1 Probably the second clause has no connection with the first, but is an alternative form of the beginning of the next sentence.
2 In July 346, when the Phocians were holding Thermopylae against Philip, the Athenians refused to help them, being misled by Aeschines and Philocrates, who represented that Philip's real hostility was directed against the Thebans. See Dem. 18.35 and Dem. 5.10.
3 Not strictly true; for Philip had not yet taken the oath, though the Athenians had. Hence Blass wished to read eirênê . . . ômômoto.
4 This translation is justified by Dem. 18.87. Others “their allies,” since the Byzantines are known to have helped the Thebans with money in the Sacred War. (Cauer, Del. Inscr. Gr. 353.)
5 The occasion of this decree, to which Demosthenes refers in Dem. 19.271, is not known. According to Plut. Them. 6 it was Themistocles who proposed it; but a schol. on Aristides names Cimon. The date in the former case would be before 471; in the latter it would be after 457, and may be connected with the mission of Megabazus to Sparta in 455, mentioned by Thuc. 1.109.
6 The last two words seem pointless. Perhaps tinos; is the attempt of a scribe to join the longer to the shorter version.
7 A frank description of the Athenian attitude, which should follow here, has dropped out, and the lemma, which is found in S and other good MSS., seems to be a poor attempt to fill the gap. It is difficult to imagine any official document that would be of use to the orator here.
8 The Greek means true to the spirit of a free, constitutional state. Aristotle describes thepolitikon plêthosas one which is “naturally warlike and qualified to rule or be ruled according to laws which distribute offices by merit” (Aristot. Pol. 3.17.4).
9 The democratic leader, afterwards honored with the citizenship of Athens.
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