On the Embassy (71-75)

and a hundred and fifty triremes which he took from the dockyards he failed to bring back, a story which the accusers of Chares are never tired of telling you in the courts; and he spent fifteen hundred talents, not upon his troops, hut upon his tricky officers, a Deiares, a Deipyrus, a Polyphontes, vagabonds collected from all Hellas (to say nothing of the wages of his hirelings on the bema and in the popular assembly), who were exacting from the wretched islanders a contribution of sixty talents a year, and seizing merchant ships and Greek citizens on the high seas.

and instead of respect and the hegemony of Hellas, Athens had a name that stank like a nest of Myonnesian[*] pirates. And Philip from his base in Macedonia was no longer contending with us for Amphipolis, but already for Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, our own possessions, while our citizens were abandoning the Chersonese, the undisputed property of Athens. And the special meetings of the assembly which you were forced to hold, in fear and tumult, were more in number than the regular meetings.

The situation was so precarious and dangerous that Cephisophon of Paeania, one of the friends and companions of Chares, was compelled to make the motion that Antiochus, who commanded the dispatch boats, should sail immediately and hunt up the general who had been put in charge of our forces, and in case he should happen to find him anywhere, should tell him that the people of Athens were astonished to learn that Philip was on the way to the Chersonese, Athenian territory, while as to the general and the force which they themselves had sent out, the Athenians did not even know what had become of them. To prove that I am speaking the truth, hear the decree and recall the facts of the war, and then charge the peace, not to the ambassadors, but to the commanders of our arms.

Decree

Such was the situation of the city, such the circumstances under which the debate on the peace took place. But the popular speakers arose and with one consent ignored the question of the safety of the state, but called on you to gaze at the Propylaea of the Acropolis, and remember the battle of , Salamis, and the tombs and trophies of our forefathers.

I replied that we must indeed remember all these, but must imitate the wisdom of our forefathers, and beware of their mistakes and their unseasonable jealousies; I urged that we should emulate the battle that we fought at Plataea, the struggles off the shores of Salamis, the battles of Marathon and Artemisium, and the generalship of Tolmides, who with a thousand picked men of the Athenians fearlessly marched straight through the Peloponnesus, the enemy’s country.