On Halonnesus (1-5)

Men of Athens, the charges that Philip brings against the speakers who here uphold your claims shall never deter us from offering our advice on what concerns your interests; for it would be monstrous if the freedom of utterance which is the privilege of this platform should be stifled by dispatches from him. But for myself, men of Athens, I wish first to touch upon the different points of his letter, and then to add my comments on the speeches of his ambassadors.

Philip begins by saying that he offers you Halonnesus as his own property, but that you have no right to demand it of him, because it was not yours when he took it, and is not yours now that he holds it. Moreover, when we ambassadors visited him, he used similar language, to the effect that he had captured the island from pirates and that therefore it belonged absolutely to him.

It is not difficult to refute this claim on the ground of its unfairness. For all pirates seize places belonging to others and turn them into strongholds from which to harry their neighbors. But a man who should defeat and punish pirates would surely be unreasonable, if he said that the stolen property wrongfully held by them passed thereby into his own possession.

For, that plea once granted, if some pirates seize a strip of Attic territory, or a part of Lemnos or Imbros or Scyros, and if someone dislodges these pirates, what is to prevent this place, where the pirates are established and which is really ours, from becoming the property of those who chastised them?

Philip is quite aware that his claim is unjust, but, though he knows this as well as anyone, he thinks that you may be hoodwinked by the men who have engaged, and are now fulfilling their engagement, to direct Athenian policy in accordance with his own desires. Nor again does he fail to see that in either case, however you dub the transaction, the island will be yours, whether it is presented or restored to you.