Olympic Oration

Among many noble feats, gentlemen, for which it is right to remember Heracles, we ought to recall the fact that he was the first, in his affection for the Greeks, to convene this contest. For previously the cities regarded each other as strangers.

But he, when he had crushed despotism and arrested outrage, founded a contest of bodily strength, a challenge of wealth, and a display of intelligence in the fairest part of Greece, that we might meet together for all these enjoyments alike of our eyes and of our ears, because he judged that our assembly here would be a beginning of mutual amity amongst the Greeks.

The project of it, then, was his; and so I have not come here to talk trivialities or to wrangle over words: I take that to be the business of utterly futile professors in straits for a livelihood; but I think it behoves a man of principle and civic worth to be giving his counsel on the weightiest questions, when I see Greece in this shameful plight, with many parts of her held subject by the foreigner, and many of her cities ravaged by despots.[*](Cf. Lys. 2.59.)

Now if these afflictions were due to weakness, it would be necessary to acquiesce in our fate: but since they are due to faction and mutual rivalry, surely we ought to desist from the one and arrest the other, knowing that, if rivalry befits the prosperous, the most prudent views befit people in a position like ours.

For we see both the gravity of our dangers and their imminence on every side: you are aware that empire is for those who command the sea, that the King[*](Artaxerxes II., who reigned 405-362 B.C.) has control of the money, that the Greeks are in thrall to those who are able to spend it, that our master possesses many ships, and that the despot of Sicily[*](Dionysius I of Syracuse, who reigned 405-367 B.C.) has many also.

We ought therefore to relinquish our mutual warfare, and with a single purpose in our hearts to secure our salvation; to feel shame for past events and fear for those that lie in the future, and to compete with our ancestors, by whom the foreigner, in grasping at the land of others, was deprived of his own, and who expelled the despots and established freedom for all in common.

But I wonder at the Lacedaemonians most of all: what can be their policy in tolerating the devastation of Greece, when they are leaders of the Greeks by the just claims alike of their inborn valor and their martial science, and when they alone have their dwelling-places unravaged though unwalled and, strangers to faction and defeat, observe always the same rules of life? Wherefore it may be expected that the liberty they possess will never die, and that having achieved the salvation of Greece in her past dangers they are providing against those that are to come.

Now the future will bring no better opportunity than the present. We ought to view the disasters of those who have been crushed, not as the concern of others, but as our own: let us not wait for the forces of both our foes to advance upon ourselves, but while there is yet time let us arrest their outrage.

For who would not be mortified to see how they have grown strong through our mutual warfare? Those incidents, no less awful than disgraceful, have empowered our dire oppressors to do what they have done, and have hindered the Greeks from taking vengeance for their wrongs.---