Greek Texts & Translations

What do you imagine were the prayers offered by Philip when he made libation? Or by the Thebans? Surely they implored strength and victory for themselves and their allies, weakness and defeat for the allies of the Phocians. In that prayer Aeschines joined. He invoked a curse on his own fatherland. It is for you to make that curse recoil upon his own head.

19.131So, when he took his departure, he was breaking a law whose penalty is death; after his arrival, he is again proved guilty of conduct that deserves death; and his earlier misconduct of this business of the embassy had been bad enough to bring him to death. You have therefore to consider what punishment shall be rigorous enough to afford a retribution adequate to all these transgressions. 19.132For assuredly, men of Athens, when all of you and the whole nation passed censure upon all the results of the peace, when you refused participation in the doings of the Amphictyonic Council, when your attitude towards Philip is still one of anger and suspicion, marking the whole of his conduct as sacrilegious and shameful, as well as unjust and injurious to yourselves,—it would be discreditable that you, who have entered this court to adjudicate at the scrutiny of those transactions, and have taken the judicial oath on behalf of the commonwealth, that you, I say, when the author of these wrongs has been placed in your power, caught red-handed after perpetrating such crimes, should return a verdict of acquittal. 19.133Is there a man among your fellow-citizens, nay, in all Greece, who will not justly upbraid you if he sees you venting your wrath upon Philip, whose offence admits of much excuse—for he was making peace after war, and buying his ways and means from willing sellers—and acquitting this man, who made infamous traffic of your interests, in defiance of laws that visit such offences with the severest retribution?

19.134Perhaps some such argument as this will be addressed to you,—that, if you condemn the diplomatists who negotiated the peace, it will be the beginning of enmity with Philip. If that is true, I do not think I could bring any more damaging charge against the defendant. If the potentate who spent his money to get the peace has indeed become so powerful and formidable that you are to ignore justice and the oath you have sworn, and consider only how to oblige Philip, what penalty can be too severe for the authors of his aggrandizement? 19.135However, I think I can satisfy you that their punishment will more probably sow the seed of a profitable friendship. Let me tell you, men of Athens, that Philip does not undervalue your city; it was not because he thought you less serviceable that he preferred the Thebans to you. But he was schooled by these men and was informed by them—I once told you this in Assembly, and none of them contradicted me— 19.136that a democracy is the most unstable and capricious thing in the world, like a restless wave of the sea ruffled by the breeze as chance will have it. One man comes, another goes; no one attends to, or even remembers, the common weal. Philip, they said, ought to have friends at Athens, who would manage his business for him as it arose, and carry it through—the person speaking, for example; if that provision were made, he would easily accomplish here whatever he desired. 19.137Now if he had heard that the persons who talked like that to him had been cudgelled to death immediately after their return home, I fancy he would have done what the King of Persia did. You remember what that was: the King had been inveigled by Timagoras, and had made him a present, as the story goes, of forty talents; but when he heard that the man had been put to death at Athens, and had not been competent to warrant his own life, much less to fulfil his undertaking, he realized that he had not paid the price to the man who could deliver the goods. The first result was that he again placed in subjection to you the city of Amphipolis, which he had put on his own list of friends and allies; and the second, that he nevermore gave money to anybody. 19.138Philip would have done the same if he had seen any of these men brought to justice; and he will do the same, if he sees that sight now. But when he sees these men holding up their heads here, making speeches, bringing other people to trial—what is he to do? Is he to make a point of spending a great deal of money, when a little will do? Is he to try to humor all of us, instead of two or three? No; that would be folly. For even his policy of public benevolence to the Thebans was by no means of his own choosing;