If we went to war again with the Thebans about Oropus Oropus was in Attica , close to the Boeotian frontier. A war for its
 possession would therefore be confined to the Thebans and the Athenians, and
 Demosthenes has no fear of the result. or for some other private
 reason, I do not think we should suffer, for both their allies and ours would,
 of course, offer support, if their own territory were invaded, but would not
 join either side in aggression. That is the way with every alliance worth
 considering, and such is the natural result. No individual ally is so fond either of us or of the Thebans as to regard our
 security and our supremacy in the same light. Secure they would all have us, for
 their own sakes; that either nation should gain supremacy and be their master
 would suit none of them. What, then, is the danger that I think we must guard
 against? Lest the inevitable war should afford all states a common pretext and a
 common ground of complaint. For if the Argives and Messenians and Megalopolitans, and other Peloponnesians
 who side with them, quarrel with us because of our embassy to Sparta and because they think that we have
 some interest in Lacedaemonian policy; and if the Thebans are, as people admit,
 hostile and likely to be even more so, because we offer an asylum to their
 exiles and make no disguise of our hostility to them in every way; and if the Thessalians dislike us because we protect the Phocian fugitives, and
 Philip because we are trying to exclude him from the Amphictyonic Council; then
 I am afraid that these separate powers, having each a private grudge, may make
 common cause against us on the strength of the Amphictyonic decrees, and may
 then be tempted to go beyond what their several interests require, as they were
 in the case of the Phocians. For of course you realize that in the present case the Thebans and Philip and the
 Thessalians have acted in complete unison, though with widely different aims.
 The Thebans, for instance, were powerless to prevent Philip from pressing on and
 seizing the passes, or from coming in at the finish and usurping the credit of
 their previous exertions.