| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 8.32 | Dem. 8.44 (Greek) | >>Dem. 8.57 |
8.39First, men of Athens , you must fix this firmly in your minds, that Philip is at war with us and has broken the peace. Yes, let there be no more wrangling over that question. He is ill-disposed and hostile to the whole city and to the very soil on which the city stands,
8.40and, I will add, to every man in the city, even to those who imagine that they stand highest in his good graces. If they doubt it, let them look at Euthycrates and Lasthenes, the Olynthians, who thought they were such bosom-friends of his, and then, when they had betrayed their city, met the most ignominious fate of all. The chief object, however, of his arms and his diplomacy is our free constitution; on nothing in the world is he more bent than on its destruction.
8.41And it is in a way natural that he should act thus. For 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 one of the many mischances to which mankind is liable, all the forces that are now under restraint will be attracted to your side.
8.42For 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 the plots of the ambitious and to 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. Far from it! Nor is his reasoning here either faulty or idle.
8.43This, then, is the first thing needful, to recognize in Philip the inveterate enemy of constitutional government and democracy, for unless you are heartily persuaded of this, you will not consent to take your politics seriously. 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, and that where any resistance is offered to him, that resistance is our gain.
8.44For no man 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 that he is now occupying and equipping?—and though he endures toil and winter storms and deadly peril for the privilege of taking them,
8.45yet he does not covet the Athenian harbors and dockyards and war-galleys and silver mines and the like sources of wealth, 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. It is not so, but it is to win these prizes that he devotes his activities to all those other objects.
8.46What, then, is the task of sound patriots? To know and realize all this, to shake off our outrageous and incurable slothfulness, to contribute funds, to call upon our allies, and to provide and arrange for the permanent upkeep of our existing army, so that just as Philip has a force ready to attack and enslave all the Greek states, so you may have one ready to protect and assist them all.
8.47For if you trust to mere expeditions, you can never gain any of your essential objects. You must first levy a force and provide for its maintenance, and appoint paymasters and clerks, and arrange that there shall be the strictest watch kept over your expenditure, and afterwards you must demand from your paymasters an account of their moneys, and from the general an account of his campaign. If you do this, and if you are really in earnest about it, you will either compel Philip to keep the peace fairly and to abide within his own frontiers—and that would be the greatest blessing of all—or you will fight him on equal terms.
Athens if she refuses to act, he will conclude that it is to our interest to perform our duty willingly.
8.49For if you have the guarantee of some god, since no mere mortal could be a satisfactory surety for such an event that if you remain inactive and abandon everything, Philip will not in the end march against yourselves, by Zeus and all the other gods, it would be disgraceful and unworthy of you and of the resources of your city and the record of your ancestors to abandon all the other Greeks to enslavement for the sake of your own ease, and I for one would rather die than be guilty of proposing such a policy. All the same, if someone else proposes it and wins your assent, so be it: offer no resistance, sacrifice everything.
8.50But if no one approves of this, and if on the contrary we all of us foresee that the more we allow him to extend his power, the stronger and more formidable we shall find him in war, what escape is open to us, or why do we delay? When, men of Athens , shall we consent to do our duty? “Whenever it is necessary,” you will say.
8.51But what any free man would call necessity is not merely present now, but is long ago past, and from the necessity that constrains a slave we must surely pray to be delivered. Do you ask the difference? The strongest necessity that a free man feels is shame for his own position, and I know not if we could name a stronger; but for a slave necessity means stripes and bodily outrage, unfit to name here, from which Heaven defend us!
8.48But if anyone thinks that all this means great expense and much toil and worry, he is quite correct, but if he reckons up what will hereafter be the result to
| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 8.32 | Dem. 8.44 (Greek) | >>Dem. 8.57 |
