Answer to Philip’s Letter (11-15)

These, again, have the whole army to support them when they face the hostile ranks, but those both have to bear the chief burden of the war, and, apart from that, it is their peculiar misfortune to fear the temper of their king. Moreover, if a common soldier is at fault, his punishment is proportioned to his deserts, but it is just when the officers are most successful that they are most exposed to unmerited curses and gibes.

And all this no one in his senses would refuse to believe; for those who have resided at his court agree that Philip is so jealous that he wants to take to himself all the credit of the chief successes, and is more annoyed with a general or an officer who achieves something praiseworthy than with those who fail ignominiously.

This being so, how is it that they have so long remained loyal to him? Because, men of Athens, at present his prosperity overshadows all such shortcomings, for success has a strange power of obscuring and covering men’s failings; but if he trips, all his weakness will be clearly revealed. For it is with the political as with the bodily constitution.

As long as a man is in good health, he is conscious of no unsoundness here or here, but when his health breaks down, every part is set a-working, be it a rupture or a sprain or any organ that is not perfectly healthy. So with all monarchies and oligarchies; as long as their arms prosper, few detect their weaknesses, but when they stumble, even as Philip must stumble beneath a burden that is greater than he can bear, then all their disadvantages are plain for all men to see.

Now if any of you, Athenians, seeing Philip’s good fortune, considers him a formidable and dangerous opponent, he is exercising a prudent forethought. For fortune is indeed a great weight in the scale; I might almost say it is everything in human affairs. And yet in many respects our good fortune is to be preferred to Philip’s.