| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 9.9 | Dem. 9.19 (Greek) | >>Dem. 9.29 |
9.16Yet what did that move of his mean? For it was peace that he had sworn note 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,
9.17but 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.
9.18In 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?
9.19So 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 .
9.20Help 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.
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.
9.24On 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.
9.25Why 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.
9.21As 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. 9.22I 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. 9.23Yet your hegemony in
| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 9.9 | Dem. 9.19 (Greek) | >>Dem. 9.29 |
