On the Chersonese

For it ought to have been the reverse, men of Athens; all your politicians should have trained you to be gentle and humane in the Assembly, for there you are dealing with rights that concern yourselves and your allies, but in preparing for war they should have made you threatening and intractable, because there you are pitted against your enemies and rivals.

As it is, by persuasive arts and caresses they have brought you to such a frame of mind that in your assemblies you are elated by their flattery and have no ear but for compliments, while in your policy and your practice you are at this moment running the gravest risks. For tell me, in Heaven’s name, if the Greeks should call you to account for the opportunities that your carelessness has already thrown away,

and should question you thus: Men of Athens, do you send us embassies on every occasion to explain how Philip is plotting against us and all the other Greeks, and how we must be on our guard against that man, and all that sort of thing?—(we are bound to admit it and plead guilty, for that is just what we do)—And yet, you most futile of mortals, when that man has been out of sight[*](As in Dem. 8.2, he alludes to Philip’s absence on his Thracian campaign.) for ten months, cut off from all chance of returning home by disease, by winter, and by war,

have you neither liberated Euboea nor regained any of your lost possessions? On the other hand, while you stay at home, at leisure and in health—(if indeed they could say that men who behave thus are in health)—Philip has set up two despots in Euboea, entrenching one right over against Attica and the other as a menace to Sciathus;

but you—have you never cleared away these obstacles, even if you had no further ambitions, and have you tamely submitted? Undoubtedly you have stood aside from his path and made it abundantly clear that, were he to die ten times over, you at least will make no further move. Then why do you pester us with your embassies and your complaints? If these are their words, what are we to say, Athenians? How are we to answer? For my part, I cannot tell.