Fourth Philippic (21-25)

Never yet, Athenians, have you instituted or organized a single plan of action properly at the start, but you always follow in the track of each event, and then, when you find yourselves too late, you give up the pursuit; when the next event occurs, you are again in a bustle of preparation.

But that is not the way. If you trust to occasional levies, you can never gain any of your essential objects; but you must first raise a force and provide for its maintenance, and appoint paymasters and clerks, and arrange that there shall be the strictest watch kept over your expenditure, and afterwards you must demand from your paymasters an account of their moneys, and from the general an account of his campaign, and you must leave the general no excuse for sailing elsewhere or engaging in any other business.

If you do this, and you are really in earnest about it, you will either compel Philip to keep the peace fairly and to stay in one place, or you will fight him on equal terms; and perhaps—perhaps, just as you are now inquiring what Philip is doing and where he is marching, so he may be anxious to know where the Athenian force is bound for, and in what quarter it will appear.

But if anyone thinks that all this means great expense and much toil and worry, he is quite correct, but if he reckons up what will hereafter be the result to Athens if she refuses to act, he will conclude that it is to our interest to perform our duty willingly. For if you have the guarantee of some god, since no mere mortal could be a satisfactory surety for such an event, that if you remain inactive and abandon everything, Philip will not in the end march against yourselves,

by Zeus and all the other gods, it would be disgraceful and unworthy of you and of the resources of your city and the record of your ancestors to abandon all the other Greeks to enslavement for the sake of your own ease, and I for one would rather die than be guilty of proposing such a policy.