Therefore he is awake, and on the watch against us; he courts certain
people, Thebans, and people in Peloponnesus of the like views, who from
cupidity, he thinks, will be satisfied with the present, and from
dullness of understanding will foresee none of the consequences. And yet
men of even moderate sense might notice striking facts, which I had
occasion to quote to the Messenians and Argives, and perhaps it is
better they should be repeated to you.

Ye, men of Messene, said I, how do ye think the Olynthians would have
brooked to hear any thing against Philip at those times, when he
surrendered to them Anthemus, which all former kings of Macedonia
claimed, when he cast out the Athenian colonists and gave them Potidaea,
taking on himself your enmity, and giving them the land to enjoy? Think
ye they expected such treatment as they got, or would have believed it
if they had been told? Nevertheless, said I, they, after enjoying for a
short time the land of others, are for a long time deprived by him of
their own, shamefully expelled, not only vanquished, but betrayed by one
another and sold. In truth, these too close connections with despots are
not safe for republics. The Thessalians, again, think ye, said I, when
he ejected their tyrants, and gave back Nicaea and Magnesia, they
expected to have the decemvirate [Footnote: Thessaly was anciently
divided into four districts, each called a _tetras_, and this, as
we learn from the third Philippic, was restored soon after the
termination of the Sacred war. The object of Philip in effecting this
arrangement was, no doubt, to weaken the influence of the great
Thessalian families by a division of power; otherwise the Pheraean
tyranny might have been exchanged for an oligarchy powerful enough to be
independent of Macedonia. The decemvirate here spoken of (if the text be
correct) was a further contrivance to forward Philip's views; whether we
adopt Leland's opinion, that each tetrarchy was governed by a council of