On the Crown (201-205)

How could we have returned the gaze of visitors to our city, if the result had been what it is—Philip the chosen lord paramount of all Greece—and if other nations had fought gallantly to avert that calamity without our aid, although never before in the whole course of history had our city preferred inglorious security to the perils of a noble cause?

There is no man living, whether Greek or barbarian, who does not know that the Thebans, or the Lacedaemonians, who held supremacy before them,[*] or the king of Persia himself, would cheerfully and gratefully have given Athens liberty to keep what she had and to take what she chose, if only she would do their behest and surrender the primacy of Greece.

But to the Athenians of old, I suppose, such temporizing was forbidden by their heredity, by their pride, by their very nature. Since the world began, no man has ever prevailed upon Athens to attach herself in the security of servitude to the oppressors of mankind however formidable: in every generation she has striven without a pause in the perilous contention for primacy, and honor, and renown.

Such constancy you deem so exemplary, and so congenial to your character, that you still sing the praises of those of your forefathers by whom it was most signally displayed. And you are right. Who would not exult in the valor of those famous men who, rather than yield to a conqueror’s behests, left city and country and made the war-galleys their home; who chose Themistocles, the man who gave them that counsel, as their commander, and stoned Cyrsilus[*] to death for advising obedient submission? Aye, and his wife also was stoned by your wives.

The Athenians of that day did not search for a statesman or a commander who should help them to a servile security: they did not ask to live, unless they could live as free men. Every man of them thought of himself as one born, not to his father and his mother alone, but to his country. What is the difference? The man who deems himself born only to his parents will wait for his natural and destined end; the son of his country is willing to die rather than see her enslaved, and will look upon those outrages and indignities, which a commonwealth in subjection is compelled to endure, as more dreadful than death itself.