Greek Texts & Translations

6.6In the first place, Athenians, if anyone views with confidence the present power of Philip and the extent of his dominions, if anyone imagines that all this imports no danger to our city and that you are not the object of his preparations, I must express my astonishment, and beg you all alike to listen to a brief statement of the considerations that have led me to form the opposite conclusion and to regard Philip as our enemy. Then, if you think me the better prophet, adopt my advice; if you prefer those who have so confidently trusted him, give them your allegiance. 6.7Now I, men of Athens, reason thus. What did Philip first get under his control after the Peace? Thermopylae and the Phocian government. Well, what did he make of these? He chose to act in the interests of Thebes, not of Athens. And why so? Because, I believe, guided in his calculations by ambition and the desire of universal dominion, regardless of the claims of peace and quietness and justice, 6.8he rightly saw that to our city and our national character he could offer nothing, he could do nothing, that would tempt you from selfish motives to sacrifice to him any of the other Greek states, but that you, reverencing justice, shrinking from the discredit involved in such transactions, and exercising due and proper forethought, would resist any such attempt on his part as stoutly as if you were actually at war with him. 6.9But as to the Thebans, he believed—and the event justified him—that in return for benefits received they would give him a free hand for the future and, so far from opposing or thwarting him, would even join forces with him, if he so ordered. Today, on the same assumption, he is doing the Messenians and the Argives a good turn. That, men of Athens, is the highest compliment he could pay you. 6.10For by these very acts you stand judged the one and only power in the world incapable of abandoning the common rights of the Greeks at any price, incapable of bartering your devotion to their cause for any favor or any profit. And it was natural that he should form this opinion of you and the contrary opinion of the Argives and Thebans, because he not merely looks to the present, but also draws a lesson from the past. 6.11For I suppose he learns from history and from report that your ancestors, when they might, at the price of submission to the Great King, have become the paramount power in Greece, not only refused to entertain that proposal, conveyed to them by Alexander, an ancestor of Philip's line, but chose to quit their homes and endure every hardship, and thereafter wrought those deeds which all men are always eager to relate, though no one has ever been able to tell them worthily; and therefore I shall not be wrong in passing them over, for they are indeed great beyond any man's power of speech. On the other hand, he learns that the ancestors of these Thebans and Argives either fought for the barbarians or did not fight against them. 6.12He knows, then, that they both will pursue their private interests, irrespective of the common advantage of the Greeks. So he thought that if he chose you, he would be choosing friends, and that your friendship would be based on justice; but that if he attached himself to the others, he would find in them the tools of his own ambition. That is why, now as then, he chooses them rather than you. For surely it is not that he regards their fleets as superior to ours, nor that, having discovered some inland empire, he has abandoned the seaboard with its harbors, nor yet that he has a short memory for the speeches and the promises that gained for him the Peace. ^note

6.13But it may be urged, by someone who claims to know all about it, that he acted on that occasion, not from ambition or from any of those motives with which I find fault, but because the claims of the Thebans were more just than ours. Now that is precisely the one argument that he cannot use now. What! The man who orders the Lacedaemonians to give up their claims to Messene, how could he pretend that he handed over Orchomenus and Coronea to Thebes because he thought it an act of justice?

6.14“But,” it will be urged (for there is this excuse left), “he was forced to yield against his better judgement, finding himself hemmed in between the Thessalian cavalry and the Theban heavy infantry.” Good! So they say he is waiting to regard the Thebans with suspicion, and some circulate a rumor that he will fortify Elatea. ^note