Philippic 3

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.

So our ancestors thought that they were bound to consider the welfare of all Greeks, for except on that assumption bribery and corruption in the Peloponnese would be no concern of theirs; and in chastising and punishing all whom they detected, they went so far as to set the offenders’ names on a pillar. The natural result was that the Greek power was dreaded by the barbarian, not the barbarian by the Greeks. But that is no longer so. For that is not your attitude towards these and other offences. What then is your attitude?

You know it yourselves. For why should you bear the whole blame, when all the other Greeks are just as bad as you? That is why I assert that the present crisis calls for earnest zeal and wise counsel. What counsel?[*](The last two words seem pointless. Perhaps τίνος; is the attempt of a scribe to join the longer to the shorter version.) Do you want me to tell you, and will you promise not to be angry?

The clerk reads from an official record[*](A frank description of the Athenian attitude, which should follow here, has dropped out, and the lemma, which is found in S and other good MSS., seems to be a poor attempt to fill the gap. It is difficult to imagine any official document that would be of use to the orator here.)

Now there is a foolish argument advanced by those who want to reassure the citizens. Philip, they say, after all is not yet what the Lacedaemonians were; they were masters of every sea and land; they enjoyed the alliance of the king of Persia; nothing could stand against them: and yet our city defended itself even against them and was not overwhelmed. But for my own part, while practically all the arts have made a great advance and we are living today in a very different world from the old one, I consider that nothing has been more revolutionized and improved than the art of war.

For in the first place I am informed that in those days the Lacedaemonians, like everyone else, would spend the four or five months of the summer season in invading and laying waste the enemy’s territory with heavy infantry and levies of citizens, and would then retire home again; and they were so old-fashioned, or rather such good citizens,[*](The Greek means true to the spirit of a free, constitutional state. Aristotle describes the πολιτικὸν πλῆθος as one which is naturally warlike and qualified to rule or be ruled according to laws which distribute offices by merit (Aristot. Pol. 3.17.4).) that they never used money to buy an advantage from anyone, but their fighting was of the fair and open kind.