{21} The rise of Philip to greatness from such small and humble
beginnings; the mistrustful and quarrelsome attitude of the Hellenes
towards one another; the fact that his growth out of what he was into what
he is was a far more extraordinary thing than would be his subjugation of
all that remains, when he has already secured so much;--all this and all
similar themes, upon which I might speak at length, I will pass over. {22}
But I see that all men, beginning with yourselves, have conceded to him
the very thing which has been at issue in every Hellenic war during the
whole of the past. And what is this? It is the right to act as he pleases
--to mutilate and to strip the Hellenic peoples, one by one, to attack and
to enslave their cities. {23} For seventy-three years[n] you were the
leading people of Hellas, and the Spartans for thirty years save one;[n]
and in these last times, after the battle of Leuctra,[n] the Thebans too
acquired some power: yet neither to you nor to Thebes nor to Sparta was
such a right ever conceded by the Hellenes, as the right to do whatever
you pleased. Far from it! {24} First of all it was your own behaviour--or
rather that of the Athenians of that day--which some thought immoderate;
and all, even those who had no grievance against Athens, felt bound to
join the injured parties, and to make war upon you. Then, in their turn,
the Spartans, when they had acquired an empire and succeeded to a
supremacy like your own, attempted to go beyond all bounds and to disturb
the established order[n] to an unjustifiable extent; and once more, all,
even those who had no grievance against them, had recourse to war. {25}
Why mention the others? For we ourselves and the Spartans, though we could
originally allege no injury done by the one people to the other,
nevertheless felt bound to go to war on account of the wrongs which we saw
the rest suffering. And yet all the offences of the Spartans in those
thirty years of power, and of your ancestors in their seventy years, were
less, men of Athens, than the wrongs inflicted upon the Greeks by Philip,
in the thirteen years, not yet completed, during which he has been to the