On the Chersonese

Now I have even heard some such remark as this: that I, of course, always speak for the best, but that you get nothing from me except words, while what the city wants is deeds and a practical policy of some sort. I will myself explain how I stand in this matter, and I will be perfectly candid. I do not think that your adviser has any business except to give the best counsel he can, and I think I can easily prove that this is so.

For you know, of course, that the famous Timotheus[*](One of the most successful of the Athenian generals, from 378 till his eclipse in 354, when he was condemned and fined for failure in the Social War. His intimacy with Isocrates had made him also an effective speaker. His biography is included in the collection of Cornelius Nepos. The occasion here referred to is the Euboean expedition of 357, when Demosthenes served as trierarch.) once harangued you to the effect that you ought to send an expedition to save the Euboeans, when the Thebans were trying to enslave them, and his words ran something like this: Tell me, he said, when you have got the Thebans in the island, are you deliberating how you will deal with them and what you ought to do? Will you not cover the sea with your war-galleys, men of Athens? Will you not rise up at once and march down to the Piraeus and drag them down the slips?

That, then, was what Timotheus said, and that was what you did, and the union of the two brought about the practical result. But if Timotheus had given you the best advice he could (as indeed he did), but you had shirked your duty and paid no heed to him, would the State have reaped any of the effects that then followed? Not a bit of it. So the same applies to whatever I utter now and whatever this man or that utters. For deeds you must look to yourselves, but for advice, the best that skill in speech can command, look to the speaker who rises to address you.

Let me sum up before I leave the platform. I say that we must pay our contributions and keep together the force now in the field, rectifying whatever seems to be amiss, but not disbanding the whole for any adverse criticism. We must send ambassadors in every direction to instruct, to exhort, to act. While doing all this, we must also punish those politicians who take bribes, and we must hate them wherever found, in order that those who prove their own virtue and honesty may find that their advice has been beneficial to themselves as well as to the citizens at large.

If you deal thus with public affairs and cease to neglect them entirely, perhaps, yes, perhaps even now there may be a change for the better. If, however, you sit here, confining your zeal to cries of dissent or approval, and drawing back from every call to duty, I see not that any words, divorced from the necessary action on your part, can ever save the State.