Philippic 3

but we idly watch the growing power of this man, each bent (or so it seems to me) on profiting by the interval afforded by another’s ruin, taking not a thought, making not an effort for the salvation of Greece. For that Philip, like the recurrence or attack of a fever or some other disease, is threatening even those who think themselves out of reach, of that not one of you is ignorant.

Ay, and you know this also, that the wrongs which the Greeks suffered from the Lacedaemonians or from us, they suffered at all events at the hands of true-born sons of Greece, and they might have been regarded as the acts of a legitimate son, born to great possessions, who should be guilty of some fault or error in the management of his estate: so far he would deserve blame and reproach, yet it could not be said that it was not one of the blood, not the lawful heir who was acting thus.

But if some slave or superstitious bastard had wasted and squandered what he had no right to, heavens! how much more monstrous and exasperating all would have called it! Yet they have no such qualms about Philip and his present conduct, though he is not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honor, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave.

Yet what is wanting to crown his insolence? Not content with the destruction of cities, is he not organizing the Pythian games, the common festival of the Greeks, and if he cannot be present in person, sending his menials to act as stewards? Is he not master of Thermopylae and the passes into Greece, holding those places with his garrisons and his mercenaries? Has he not the right of precedence at the Oracle, ousting us and the Thessalians and the Dorians and the rest of the Amphictyons from a privilege which not even all Greek states can claim?

Does he not dictate to the Thessalians their form of government? Does he not send mercenaries, some to Porthmus to expel the Eretrian democracy, others to Oreus to set up the tyranny of Philistides? Yet the Greeks see all this and suffer it. They seem to watch him just as they would watch a hailstorm, each praying that it may not come their way, but none making any effort to stay its course.

And it is not only his outrages on Greece that go unavenged, but even the wrongs which each suffers separately. For nothing can go beyond that. Are not the Corinthians hit by his invasion of Ambracia and Leucas? The Achaeans by his vow to transfer Naupactus to the Aetolians? The Thebans by his theft of Echinus? And is he not marching even now against his[*](This translation is justified by Dem. 18.87. Others their allies, since the Byzantines are known to have helped the Thebans with money in the Sacred War. (Cauer, Del. Inscr. Gr. 353.)) allies the Byzantines?

Of our own possessions, not to mention other places, is he not holding Cardia, the greatest city in the Chersonese? In spite of such treatment, we hesitate one and all, we play the coward, we keep an eye on our neighbors, distrusting one another rather than our common foe. Yet if he treats us all with such brutality, what do you think he will do when he has got each of us separately into his clutches?

What then is the cause of this? For not without reason, not without just cause, the Greeks of old were as eager for freedom as their descendants today are for slavery. There was something, men of Athens, something which animated the mass of the Greeks but which is lacking now, something which triumphed over the wealth of Persia, which upheld the liberties of Hellas, which never lost a single battle by sea or land, something the decay of which has ruined everything and brought our affairs to a state of chaos. And what was that?

It was nothing recondite or subtle, but simply that men who took bribes from those who wished to rule Greece or ruin her, were hated by all, and it was the greatest calamity to be convicted of receiving a bribe, and such a man was punished with the utmost severity and no intercession, no pardon was allowed.

At each crisis, therefore, the opportunity for action, with which fortune often equips the careless against the vigilant and those who shrink from deeds against those who fulfil their duties, could not be bought at a price from our politicians or our generals; no, nor our mutual concord, nor our distrust of tyrants and barbarians, nor, in a word, any such advantage.

Now, however, all these things have been sold in open market, and in place of them we have imported vices which have infected Greece with a mortal sickness. And what are those vices? Envy of the man who has secured his gains; contempt for him who confesses; pardon for those who are convicted hatred for him who censures such dealings; and every other vice that goes hand in hand with corruption.

For war-galleys, men in abundance, money and material without stint, everything by which one might gauge the strength of our cities, these we as a body possess today in number and quantity far beyond the Greeks of former times. But all our resources are rendered useless, powerless, worthless by these traffickers.

That this is so, you surely see for yourselves with regard to the present, and you need no evidence of mine, but that it was the opposite in the days of old I will prove, not in my own words, but by the written record of your ancestors, which they engraved on a bronze pillar and set up in the Acropolis. It was not for their own use, for without these documents their instinct was right; but it was that you might have these examples to remind you that such cases ought to be regarded seriously.

Arthmius of Zelea, it says, son of Pythonax, outlaw and enemy of the people of Athens and of their allies, himself and his family. Then is recorded the reason for this punishment: because he conveyed the gold of the Medes to the Peloponnese. So runs the inscription.

I earnestly implore you to consider what was the intention of the Athenians who did this thing, or what was their proud claim. They proscribed as their enemy and the enemy of their allies, disfranchising him and his family, a man of Zelea, one Arthmius, a slave of the Great King (for Zelea is in Asia), because in the service of his master he conveyed gold, not to Athens but to the Peloponnese.[*](The occasion of this decree, to which Demosthenes refers in Dem. 19.271, is not known. According to Plut. Them. 6 it was Themistocles who proposed it; but a schol. on Aristides names Cimon. The date in the former case would be before 471; in the latter it would be after 457, and may be connected with the mission of Megabazus to Sparta in 455, mentioned by Thuc. 1.109.)

This was not outlawry as commonly understood; for what mattered it to a native of Zelea if he was to be debarred from a share in the common rights of Athenian citizens? But the statutes relating to murder provide for cases where prosecution for murder is not allowed but where it is a righteous act to slay the murderer and he shall die an outlaw, says the legislator. This simply means that anyone slaying a member of Arthmius’s family would be free from blood-guilt.