On the False Embassy

Again, the consideration that not a city of the Phocians was taken forcibly, whether by blockade or assault, and yet that they were all brought to utter ruin under the convention, is a convincing proof that they perished because they had been persuaded through these men that Philip would deliver them; for about his character they had no illusions. Now give me our treaty with the Phocians, and the Amphictyonic decrees, under which they dismantled their defences. These documents will show you on what footing you stood with them, and what treatment they have received by the fault of these wicked men. Read.

(The Treaty of Friendship between the Athenians and the Phocians is read)

These are the relations that subsisted between you and them—friendship, alliance, succor. Now hear what they have suffered through the man who thwarted the succor you owed them. Read.

(The Convention between Philip and the Phocians is read)

You hear it, men of Athens. A convention between Philip and the Phocians, it says, not between the Thebans and the Phocians, or the Thessalians and the Phocians, or the Locrians, or any other of the nationalities then present. Again, it says that the Phocians are to surrender their cities to Philip, not to the Thebans, or the Thessalians, or any other people.

Why? Because you had been assured by Aeschines that Philip had come to deliver the Phocians. In Aeschines they had confidence; to Aeschines they looked for aid; with Aeschines they were making their peace. Read the other documents. Now you shall see to what sufferings they were brought by that confidence. Does the story agree with, does it in any way resemble, those reports of Aeschines? Read.

(The Decrees of the Amphictyonic Council are read)

Men of Athens, nothing more awful or more momentous has befallen in Greece within living memory, nor, as I believe, in all the history of the past. Yet through the agency of these men all these great and terrible transactions have been dominated by a single individual, though the city of Athens is still in being, the city whose ancestral prerogative it was to stand forth as the champion of the Hellenic race, and declare that such things shall not be. In what fashion these unhappy Phocians have perished you may learn, not from the decrees alone,

but from the deeds that have been wrought—a spectacle, men of Athens, to move us to terror and pity indeed! Not long ago, when we were travelling to Delphi, necessity compelled us to look upon that scene—homesteads levelled with the ground, cities stripped of their defensive walls, a countryside all emptied of its young men; only women, a few little children, and old men stricken with misery. No man could find words adequate to the woes that exist in that country today. And yet these are the people—you take the words out of my mouth—these are the people who in the day of our trial[*](in the day of our trial: 404 B.C. when, after the naval defeat at Aegispotami, and the surrender of the city to Lysander, Athens lay at the mercy of Thebes, Sparta, and Corinth. Grote, ch. 65.) openly cast their vote against the Thebans, when the question was the enslavement of us all!

Then what vote, what judgement, men of Athens, do you think that our forefathers would give, if they could recover consciousness, at the trial of the men who devised the destruction of the Phocians? I conceive that they would account even those who should stone them to death with their own hands to be free of all bloodguiltiness. For is it not an ignominy—or use a stronger word if such there be—that, by the fault of these men, the people who saved us at that crisis, and gave for us the verdict of deliverance, have received evil in requital of good, and have been abandoned to the endurance of afflictions such as no people of the Greeks has ever known? And who is the author of those wrongs? Who is the contriver of that deception? Who but Aeschines?

Men of Athens, Philip has many claims to congratulation on his good fortune, but beyond them all he might well be especially congratulated for one thing, in which I solemnly declare that I can name no man of our time who has been equally fortunate. Such achievements as the capture of great cities and the subjugation of a vast territory are, I suppose, enviable, as they are undoubtedly imposing; yet we could mention many other men who have done the like.

But the stroke of good fortune I have in mind is peculiar to him and has befallen no other man. What is it? It is that, when he needed scoundrels for his purposes, he found bigger scoundrels than he wanted. For surely that is a fair description of the men who deceived you, hiring themselves out for lies which Philip, in spite of the great interests at issue, did not dare to tell on his own account, which he never wrote in any letter or put into the mouth of ambassadors of his own.

Antipater and Parmenio, though they were in the service of a hard taskmaster, and though they were not likely to fall in with you again, nevertheless claimed exemption from serving as the agents of your beguilement; and yet citizens of Athens, the appointed envoys of the freest of all cities, men who must needs encounter you and look you in the face, who must live with you all the rest of their life, who would have to render you a strict account of their actions, accepted a commission to beguile you! Could any men be more wicked or more lost to all sense of shame?

To show you that this man is already accursed by you, and that religion and piety forbid you to acquit one who has been guilty of such falsehoods,—recite the curse.[*](Every meeting of the Assembly and of the Council opened with a form of prayer, which included a curse on the enemies of the state and was recited by the marshal (κῆρυξ) at the dictation of an under-clerk. The curse has nowhere been preserved, but a parody will be found in Aristoph. Thes. 331 ff.) Take and read it from the statute: here it is.

(The Statutory Commination is read)

This imprecation, men of Athens, is pronounced, as the law directs, by the marshal on your behalf at every meeting of the Assembly, and again before the Council at all their sessions. The defendant cannot say that he is not familiar with it, for, when acting as clerk to the Assembly and as an officer of the Council, he used to dictate the statute to the marshal.

Would you not have acted absurdly and preposterously if today, when the power is in your own hands, you should preclude yourselves from doing what you enjoin, or rather require, the gods to do on your behalf; if you should yourselves release a man whom you have implored them to extirpate along with his household and his kindred? Never! Leave the undetected sinner to the justice of the gods; but about the sinner whom you have caught yourselves, lay no further injunctions on them.

I am informed that he has become so proficient in effrontery and hardihood that he will disavow all his acts—his reports, his promises, his deceptions of the city—as though he were not on trial before a jury that knows the whole truth, and that he will denounce first the Lacedaemonians,then the Phocians, and then Hegesippus. That is buffoonery, nay, barefaced impudence.

Whatever he may say just now about the Phocians or the Lacedaemonians or Hegesippus,—that they did not receive Proxenus, that they are irreligious, that they are—anything he can say to their disadvantage,—surely all that was finished and done with before the return of the envoys to Athens, and therefore could not have stood in the way of the deliverance of the Phocians. Who says so? Why, Aeschines here, the defendant himself.

For he did not allege in his report that, but for the Lacedaemonians, but for their refusal to receive Proxenus, but for Hegesippus, but for this or that, the Phocians would have been delivered. He passed over all that, and declared explicitly that before his return he had persuaded Philip to deliver the Phocians, to repopulate Boeotia, and to put the whole business into your hands; that it would all be accomplished within two or three days, and that in revenge the Thebans had set a price upon his head.

Do not, then, listen to anything that had been done by Lacedaemonians or Phocians before he made his report; do not let him talk about it; do not permit him to denounce the Phocians and call them rascals. You saved the Lacedaemonians in old time, and those accursed Euboeans lately, and many other peoples, not because they were virtuous, but because their safety profited Athens, as that of the Phocians would today. What transgression did the Phocians or the Lacedaemonians or you or anyone else commit after Aeschines’ speech, that the promises made by him to you then should not be fulfilled?

Ask him that question. He can point to none. For he made his lying report, you believed it, the Phocians heard of it, surrendered, and perished, all within a period of five days only. Hence it is clearly evident that the ruin of the Phocians was nothing but a concoction of deceit and artifice. For during the time when Philip was unable to march by reason of the peace, but was already laying his plans, he sent for the Lacedaemonians, promising to do everything for them, so that the Phocians might not, through your agency, secure their help.

But when he had reached Thermopylae, and when the Lacedaemonians, detecting the snare, had withdrawn, he sent Aeschines as his agent in advance for your deception, lest, when you discovered that he was acting in the interest of the Thebans, he should be involved once more in delays and fighting and waste of time with the Phocians resisting him, and you helping them. In this way he hoped to obtain complete mastery without a struggle. And so it fell out. Aeschines, then, must not escape punishment for deceiving you, merely because Philip deceived the Lacedaemonians and the Phocians. That would be unjust indeed.

If as an offset to the Phocians and Thermopylae and all our other losses he tells you that the city still retains the Chersonese, I adjure you not to accept that excuse. In addition to the wrongs he has done you by his embassy, you must not suffer him by his defence also to fasten upon the city the reproach that, while stealthily securing some of your own possessions, you made sacrifice of the safety of your allies. You did no such thing. Peace was concluded; the Chersonese was secure; and then for the four ensuing months the Phocians were not imperilled, until you were deceived, and the Phocians destroyed, by this man’s mendacity.

Moreover, you will find that the Chersonese is in greater danger now than then. When would it have been easier to punish Philip for wrongful aggression upon that country—before he forestalled us at Thermopylae, or today? Surely far easier then! What, then, does it profit us that we still retain the Chersonese, if the man, who would have invaded it if he could, is freed from the apprehensions and perils that deterred him?

I hear of another argument he will use: he will wonder why his accuser is Demosthenes and not one of the Phocians. I had better explain at once how the matter stands. The best and most respectable of the expatriated Phocians, being exiled and in distress, are living peaceably, and none of them would be willing to incur private animosity on account of the misfortunes of the nation, while those who might have done anything for a fee find that there is no one to pay it them.