share our danger. {10} For this reason I exhort you not to be the first, in any
way whatever, to take up the war; but for the decisive struggle I think you
ought to be ready and your preparations made. And further, if the forces[n] with
which foreigners and Hellenes could respectively be repelled were really
different in kind, the fact that we were arraying our forces against the king
would naturally, it may be, admit of no concealment. {11} But since all military
preparations are of the same character, and the main points of a force must
always be the same--the means to repel enemies, to help allies, and to retain
existing advantages--why, when we have our acknowledged foes,[n] do we seek to
procure others? Let us rather prepare ourselves to meet the enemies whom we
have, and we shall then repel the king also, if he takes the aggressive against
us. {12} Suppose that you yourselves summon the Hellenes to your side now. If,
when the attitude of some of them towards you is so disagreeable, you do not
fulfil their demands, how can you expect that any one will listen to you? 'Why,'
you say, 'we shall tell them that the king is plotting against them.' Good
Heavens! Do you imagine that they do not foresee this themselves? Of course they
do. But their fear of this does not yet outweigh the quarrels which some of them
have against you and against each other. And so the tour of your envoys will end
in nothing but their own rhapsodies.[n] {13} But if you wait, then, if the
design which we now suspect is really on foot, there is not one of the Hellenes
who stands so much upon his dignity that he will not come and beg for your aid,
when he sees that you have a thousand cavalry, and infantry as many as any one
can desire, and three hundred ships: for he will know that in these lies his
surest hope of deliverance. Appeal to them now, and we shall be suppliants, and,
if unsuccessful, rejected suppliants. Make your own preparations and wait, and
then they will be the suppliants and we their deliverers; and we may rest
assured that they will all come to us for help.

{14} In thinking out these points and others like them, men of Athens, my object
was not to devise a bold speech,[n] prolonged to no purpose: but I took the