On the Crown

In your presence, men of Athens, I now invoke all the gods and goddesses whose domain is the land of Attica. I invoke also Pythian Apollo, the ancestral divinity of this city, and I solemnly beseech them all that, if I shall speak the truth now, and if I spoke truth to my countrymen when first I saw this miscreant putting his hand to that transaction—for I knew it, I knew it instantly—they may grant to me prosperity and salvation. But if with malice or in the spirit of personal rivalry I lay against him any false charge, I pray that they may dispossess me of everything that is good.

This imprecation I address to Heaven, and this solemn averment I now make, because, though I have letters, deposited in the Record Office, enabling me to offer absolute proof, and though I am sure that you have not forgotten the transaction, I am afraid that his ability may be deemed inadequate for such enormous mischief. That mistake was made before, when by his false reports he contrived the destruction of the unhappy Phocians.

The war at Amphissa, that is, the war that brought Philip to Elatea, and caused the election, as general of the Amphictyons, of a man who turned all Greece upside down, was due to the machinations of this man. In his own single person he was the author of all our worst evils. I protested instantly; I raised my voice in Assembly; I cried aloud, You are bringing war into Attica, Aeschines, an Amphictyonic war; but a compact body of men, sitting there under his direction, would not let me speak, and the rest were merely astonished and imagined that I was laying an idle charge in private spite.

Men of Athens, you were not allowed to hear me then; but now you must and shall hear what was the real nature of that business, what was the purpose of the conspiracy, and how it was accomplished. You will see how skilfully it was contrived; you will get the benefit of new insight into your own politics and you will form an idea of the supreme craftiness of Philip.

For Philip there could be no end or quittance of hostilities with Athens unless he should make the Thebans and Thessalians her enemies. Now, aIthough your commanders were conducting the war against him without ability and without success, he was vastly distressed both by the campaign and by the privateers; for he could neither export the products of his own country, nor import what he needed for himself.

At that time he had no supremacy at sea, nor could he reach Attica by land unless the Thessalians followed his banner and the Thebans gave him free passage. In spite of his successes against the commanders you sent out, such as they were—I have nothing to say of their failure—he found himself in trouble by reason of conditions of locality and of the comparative resources of the two combatants.

Now, if he should invite the Thebans or the Thessalians to take up his private quarrel and march against you, he could expect no attention; but if he should espouse their joint grievances and be chosen as their leader, he might hope to succeed by a mixture of deception and persuasion. Very well; he sets to work—and observe how cleverly he managed it—to throw the Pylaean Congress into confusion and to implicate the Amphictyonic Council in warfare, feeling certain that they would immediately beg him to deal with the situation.

If, however, the question should be introduced by any of the commissioners of religion sent by him or by any allies of his, the Thebans and Thessalians, as he expected, would be suspicious and all on their guard; but, if the operator should be an Athenian, representing his opponents, he conceived that he would easily escape detection. And such was the actual result.

How did he manage it? By hiring Aeschines. Nobody, of course, had any inkling; nobody was watching— according to your usual custom! Aeschines was nominated for the deputation to Thermopylae; three or four hands were held up, and he was declared elected. He repaired to the Council, invested with all the prestige of Athens, and at once, putting aside and disregarding everything else, addressed himself to the business for which he had taken pay. He concocted a plausible speech about the legendary origin of the consecration of the Cirrhaean territory, and by this narration induced the commissioners, men unversed in oratory and unsuspicious of consequences,

to vote for a tour of survey of the land which the Amphissians said they were cultivating because it belonged to them, while Aeschines accused them of intruding on consecrated ground. It is not true that these Locrians w ere meditating any suit against Athens, or any other action such as he now falsely alleges in excuse. You will find a proof of his falsehood in this argument:—Of course it was not competent for the Locrians to take proceedings against Athens without serving a summons. Well, who served it? From what office was it issued? Name anyone who knows; point him out. You cannot; it was a false and idle pretext of yours.

With Aeschines as their trusty guide, the Amphictyons began their tour of the territory; but the Locrians fell upon them, were within an ace of spearing the whole crowd, and did actually seize and carry off the sacred persons of several commissioners. Complaints were promptly laid, and so war against the Amphissians was provoked. At the outset Cottyphus was commander of an army composed of Amphictyons; but some divisions never joined, and those who joined did nothing at all. The persons engaged in the plot, mostly scoundrels of old standing from Thessaly and other states, prepared to put the war into Philip’s hands at the next congress.

They found a plausible pretext: you must either, they said, pay contributions to a war-chest, maintain mercenary forces, and levy a fine on all recusants, or else elect Philip as commander-in-chief: and so, to cut a long story short, elected he was on this plea. He lost no time, collected his army, pretended to march to Cirrha, and then bade the Cirrhaeans and the Locrians alike good-bye and good luck, and seized Elatea.

When the Thebans saw the trick, they promptly changed their minds and joined our side; otherwise the whole business would have descended upon Athens like a torrent from the hills. In fact, the Thebans checked him for the moment; and for that relief, men of Athens, you have first and chiefly to thank the kindness of some friendly god, but in a secondary degree, and so far as one man could help, you have to thank me. Hand me those decrees, with the dates of the several transactions. They will show you what a mass of trouble this consummate villain provoked; and yet he was never punished.

Please read the decrees.

(Sundry Resolutions of the Amphictyons are read)

In the priesthood of Cleinagoras, at the spring session, it was resolved by the Wardens and the Assessors of the Amphictyons, and by the General Synod of the Amphictyons, that, whereas Amphissians are encroaching upon the sacred territory and are sowing and grazing the same, the Wardens and Assessors shall attend and mark out the boundaries with pillars, and shall forbid the Amphissians hereafter to encroach.

In the priesthood of Cleinagoras, at the spring session, it was resolved by the Wardens, Assessors, and General Synod that whereas the Amphissians who have occupied the sacred territory are tilling and grazing the same, and, when forbidden to do so, have appeared in arms and resisted the common assembly of the Greeks by force, and have actually wounded some of them, the general appointed by some of the Amphictyons, Cottyphus the Arcadian, shall go as an ambassador to Philip of Macedon and request him to come to the help of Apollo and the Amphictyons, that he may not suffer the god to be outraged by the impious Amphissians; he shall also announce that Philip is appointed General with full powers by the Greeks who are members of the Assembly of the Amphictyons.

Now read the dates of these transactions. They are all dates at which he was or spokesman at the Congress of Thermopylae.

(The Record of Dates is read)

Archonship of Mnesitheides, on the sixteenth of the month Anthesterion.

Now hand me the letter which Philip dispatched to his Peloponnesian allies, when the Thebans disobeyed him. Even that letter will give you a clear proof that he was concealing the true reasons of his enterprise, namely his designs against Greece, and especially against Thebes and Athens, and was only pretending zeal for the national interests as defined by the Amphictyonic Council. But the man who provided him with that basis of action and those pretexts was Aeschines. Read.

(Philip’s Letter is read)

Philip, king of Macedonia, to the public officers and councillors of the allied Peloponnesians and to all his other Allies, greeting. Since the Ozolian Locrians, settled at Amphissa, are outraging the temple of Apollo at Delphi and come in arms to plunder the sacred territory, I consent to join you in helping the god and in punishing those who transgress in any way the principles of religion. Therefore meet under arms at Phocis with forty days’ provisions in the next month, styled Lous by us, Boedromion by the Athenians, and Panemus by the Corinthians. Those who, being pledged to us, do not join us in full force, we shall treat as punishable. Farewell.

You see how he avoids personal excuses, and takes shelter in Amphictyonic reasons. Who gave him his equipment of deceit? Who supplied him with these pretexts ? Who above all others is to blame for all the ensuing mischief? Who but Aeschines? Then do not go about saying, men of Athens, that these disasters were brought upon Greece by Philip alone. I solemnly aver that it was not one man, but a gang of traitors in every state.

One of them was Aeschines; and, if I am to tell the whole truth without concealment, I will not flinch from declaring him the evil genius of all the men, all the districts, and all the cities that have perished. Let the man who sowed the seed bear the guilt of the harvest. I marvel that you did not avert your faces the moment you set eyes on him; only, as it seems, there is a cloud of darkness between you and the truth.

In dealing with his unpatriotic conduct I have approached the question of the very different policy pursued by myself. For many reasons you may fairly be asked to listen to my account of that policy, but chiefly because it would be discreditable, men of Athens, that you should be impatient of the mer e recital of those arduous labors on your behalf which I had patience to endure.