On the Crown (66-70)

To resume my argument: I ask you, Aeschines, what was the duty of Athens when she perceived that Philip’s purpose was to establish a despotic empire over all Greece? What language, what counsels, were incumbent upon an adviser of the people at Athens, of all places in the world, when I was conscious that, from the dawn of her history to the day when I first ascended the tribune, our country had ever striven for primacy, and honor, and renown, and that to serve an honor able ambition and the common welfare of Greece she had expended her treasure and the lives of her sons far more generously than any other Hellenic state fighting only for itself;

and knowing as I did that our antagonist Philip himself, contending for empire and supremacy, had endured the loss of his eye, the fracture of his collar-bone, the mutilation of his hand and his leg, and was ready to sacrifice to the fortune of war any and every part of his body, if only the life of the shattered remnant should be a life of honor and renown?

Surely no man will dare to call it becoming that in a man reared at Pella, then a mean and insignificant city, such lofty ambition should be innate as to covet the dominion of all Greece, and admit that aspiration to his soul, while you, natives of Athens, observing day by day, in every speech you hear and ill every spectacle you behold, memorials of the high prowess of your forefathers, should sink to such cowardice as by a spontaneous, voluntary act to surrender your liberty to a Philip.

No one will make that assertion. The only remaining, and the necessary, policy was to resist with justice all his unjust designs. That policy was adopted by you from the start in a spirit that well became you, and forwarded by me in all my proposals, according to the opportunities of my public life. I admit the charge. Tell me; what ought I to have done? I put the question to you, Aeschines, dismissing for the moment everything else—Amphipolis, Pydna, Potidaea, Halonnesus. I have no recollection of those places.

Serrium, Doriscus, the sack of Peparethus, and all other injuries of our city—I ignore them utterly. Yet you told us that I entangled the citizens in a quarrel by my talk about those places, though every resolution that concerned them was moved by Eubulus, or Aristophon, or Diopeithes, not by me; only you allege so glibly whatever suits your purpose!