and absolute power, had had his eye knocked out, his collar-bone broken,
his hand and his leg maimed, and was ready to resign any part of his body
that Fortune chose to take from him, provided that with what remained he
might live in honour and glory? {68} And surely no one would dare to say
that it was fitting that in one bred at Pella, a place then inglorious and
insignificant, there should have grown up so lofty a spirit that he
aspired after the empire of Hellas, and conceived such a project in his
mind; but that in you, who are Athenians, and who day by day in all that
you hear and see behold the memorials of the gallantry of your
forefathers, such baseness should be found, that you would yield up your
liberty to Philip by your own deliberate offer and deed. {69} No man would
say this. One alternative remained, and that, one which you were bound to
take--that of a righteous resistance to the whole course of action by
which he was doing you injury. You acted thus from the first, quite
rightly and properly; while I helped by my proposals and advice during the
time of my political activity, and I do not deny it. But what ought I to
have done? For the time has come to ask you this, Aeschines, and to
dismiss everything else. {70} Amphipolis, Pydna, Poteidaea, Halonnesus--
all are blotted from my memory. As for Serrhium, Doriscus, the sack of
Peparethus, and all the other injuries inflicted upon the city, I renounce
all knowledge of their ever having happened--though you actually said that
_I_ involved my countrymen in hostility by talking of these things, when
the decrees which deal with them were the work of Eubulus and
Aristophon[n] and Diopeithes,[n] and not mine at all--so glibly do you
assert anything that suits your purpose! {71} But of this too I say
nothing at present. I only ask you whether Philip, who was appropriating
Euboea,[n] and establishing it as a stronghold to command Attica; who was
making an attempt upon Megara, seizing Oreus, razing the walls of
Porthmus, setting up Philistides as tyrant at Oreus and Cleitarchus at
Eretria, bringing the Hellespont into his own power, besieging Byzantium,