William Jackson Brodribb

“ He who looks on himself as merely the child of his parents, awaits death in the ordinary course of nature; while he who looks on himself as the child also of his country, will be ready to lay down his life rather than see her enslaved, and will hold death itself less terrible than the insults and indignities which the citizens of a state in slavery to the foreigner must endure. ”

“ If we had abandoned without a struggle all which our forefathers braved every danger to win, who would not have spurned you, Æschines? God forbid that I should so speak of the State as of myself. How could we have looked in the face the strangers who flock to our city, if things had reached their present pass—Philip the chosen leader and lord of all—while others without our assistance had home the struggle to avert this consummation? "We! who have never in times past preferred inglorious safety to peril in the path of honour. ”

“ Philip was now the acknowledged head of the Greek world. Phocion, Athens' best soldier, as well as a highly honourable citizen, told the Athenians that they must acquiesce in this result. Demosthenes had not a word left to say on foreign policy. The subject was, in fact, closed. He was continually and virulently attacked by his political opponents, but he was too strong for them. He spoke the funeral eulogy at the obsequies of the slain in the great battle—an honour to which he was chosen in preference to Æschines, as well as to Demades, who had negotiated the peace. ”

“ It was bravely led by a king of Sparta, who fell in a hard-fought battle near Megalopolis with Antipater, to whom Alexander had intrusted his kingdom during his absence. Greece could now no longer even dream of independence. Anything like an anti-Macedonian policy would be preposterous; and there was thus an opportunity at Athens of attempting to rouse popular feeling against any statesman who had advocated that policy, the end of which had been so fatal to Greece. ”

“ She had been a traitor to the common cause in the great struggle with Persia; and afterwards, with a peculiar baseness, she had urged Sparta to slaughter, in cold blood, the brave Platæans, whose only crime was, that they had sided with Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Thebes was now blotted out of existence. Again Athens trembled. Alexander, there was reason to believe, was magnanimous ”

“ In defending himself he attacks his rival, and denounces him as really the author of the calamities which had fallen on the Greek world. It was through the diplomacy of Æschines, he declares, that Philip was admitted to Thermopylæ, the beginning of all the subsequent mischief. If it was dreadful to think of Greece being under a foreign master, it was a glorious fact that Athens had done her best to avert such a disgrace. ”