Greek Texts & Translations

10.11But there are some who, without waiting to hear the speeches on these questions, are in the habit of asking at once, “What then ought we to do?”—not in order to do it, when they have heard it, for if so, they would be the most helpful of all citizens, but simply to get rid of the speaker. Nevertheless, you must be told what you ought to do. First, men of Athens, you must fix this firmly in your minds, that Philip is at war with us and has broken the peace, and that he is ill-disposed and hostile to the whole city and to the very soil on which the city stands, and, I will add, to the gods that dwell in it; and may those same gods complete his ruin! The chief object, however, of his arms and his diplomacy is our free constitution, and on nothing in the world is he more bent than on its destruction. 10.12And it is in a way inevitable that he should now be acting thus. For observe! He wants to rule, and he has made up his mind that you, and you only, bar the way. He has long injured you; of nothing is he more conscious than of that. For it is by holding the cities that are really yours that he retains safe possession of all the rest; 10.13and if he gave up Amphipolis and Potidaea, even Macedonia would be no safe place for him. He knows, then, these two facts—that he is intriguing against you and that you are aware of it. Assuming that you are intelligent, he concludes that you hate him. Besides these weighty considerations, he knows for certain that even if he masters all else, his power will be precarious as long as you remain a democracy, but if ever he meets with some mischance (and there are many to which mankind is liable), all the forces that are now under restraint will be attracted to your side. 10.14For nature has not equipped you to seek aggrandizement and secure empire, but you are clever at thwarting another's designs and wresting from him his gains, and quick to confound utterly the plots of the ambitious and vindicate the freedom of all mankind. Therefore he does not want to have the Athenian tradition of liberty watching to seize every chance against himself; nor is his reasoning here either faulty or idle. 10.15This, then, is the first thing needful, to recognize in Philip the inveterate enemy of constitutional government and democracy; and your second need is to convince yourselves that all his activity and all his organization is preparing the way for an attack on our city. For none of you is so simple as to believe that though Philip covets these wretched objects in Thrace—for what else can one call Drongilus and Cabyle and Mastira and the other places he is said to be now holding ?—and though he endures toil and winter storms and deadly peril for the privilege of taking them, 10.16yet he does not covet the Athenian harbours and dockyards and war-galleys and the place itself and the glory of it—and never may Philip or any other man make himself master of these by the conquest of our city!—but will allow you to retain them, while he winters in that purgatory for the sake of the rye and millet of the Thracian store-pits. 10.17It is not so, but it is to win these prizes that he devotes his activities to all those other objects.

Therefore each must know and feel in his own mind the truth of this, but you must not, of course, call for a declaration of war from the statesman who is trying, in all honesty, to give you the best advice; for that would be the act of men who want to find someone to fight with, not of men who seek the interests of their state. ^note 10.18For consider. If for his first violation of the peace, or his second or third—for there was a long series of them—someone had proposed a declaration of war against him, and if Philip, just as he is doing now when no one proposes such a declaration, had gone to the help of the Cardians, would not the proposer have been suppressed, ^note and blamed by everybody as the real author of Philip's expedition? 10.19Then do not look about for a scapegoat for Philip's sins, someone whom you can throw for his hirelings to rend limb from limb. Do not vote for war and then fall to disputing among yourselves whether you ought or ought not to have done so, but imitate his methods of warfare, supplying those who are now resisting him with money and whatever else they need, and raising a war-fund yourselves, Athenians, and providing an army, swift-sailing galleys, horses, cavalry-transports, and everything that war requires.