Phocians

Now give me our treaty with the Phocians, and the Amphictyonic decrees, under which they dismantled their defences.

What transgression did the Phocians or the Lacedaemonians or you or anyone else commit after Aeschines’ speech, that the promises made by him to you then should not be fulfilled?

There remained the question of the Phocians and Thermopylae, and we must not—such was my advice—we must not repeat our experience, and throw them overboard, and so, in reliance upon a succession of idle hopes and assurances, allow ourselves to fall into the last extremity of disaster.

Since the Thessalians were trying to subdue them, the Phocians made this their protection, and in their search for every means to keep the Thessalians from invading their country, they then turned the stream from the hot springs into the pass, so that it might be a watercourse.

In this part of the mountain one thousand armed men of the Phocians were on watch, as I have already shown, defending their own country and guarding the path.

This is what they intended, but the Persians with Epialtes and Hydarnes paid no attention to the Phocians and went down the mountain as fast as possible.

and from the immediate neighbourhood there came to him hoplites of the Orchomenians and Phocians.

but Gylis, the polemarch, withdrew with the army to Phocis and from there made an invasion of Locris.

Meanwhile the Athenians, seeing that the Plataeans, who were their friends, had been expelled from Boeotia and had fled to them for refuge, and that the Thespians were beseeching them not to allow them to be left without a city, no longer commended the Thebans, but, on the contrary, while they were partly ashamed to make war upon them and partly reckoned it to be inexpedient, they nevertheless ref …

And the Phocians having marched against the Dorians, the mother-country of the Lacedaemonians, [whose towns were] Boeum, and Citinium, and Erineum, and having taken one of these places, the Lacedaemonians under the command of Nicomedes, the son of Cleombrotus, in the stead of Pleistoanax, son of Pausanias, who was yet a minor, went to the aid of the Dorians with fifteen hundred heavy-armed of thei …

and the Athenians again afterwards, on their retiring, marched and took possession of it, and restored it to the Phocians.

and taking with them the Boeotians and Phocians, who were their allies, the Athenians marched against Pharsalus in Thessaly.

When the Phocian war began—not by my fault, for I was still outside politics—you were at first disposed to hope that the Phocians would escape ruin, although you knew that they were in the wrong, and to exult over any misfortune that might befall the Thebans, with whom you were justly and reasonably indignant because of the immoderate use they had made of the advantage they gained at Leuctra.

and it was an interest common to Philip, to the Phocians, and to all of you alike, to be quit of the unfeeling and offensive behavior of the Thebans.

Know that we have passed within the Gates, and have subdued the district of Phocis.

I carried the jurors off bodily from the charges brought against Timarchus, and set them on the accuser, and Philip, and the Phocians, and I suspended such terrors before the eyes of the hearers that the defendant began to be the accuser, and the accuser to be on trial;

But when you had passed a decree that the Phocians should hand over these posts to your general Proxenus, and that you should man fifty triremes, and that all citizens up to the age of forty years should take part in the expedition, then instead of surrendering the Posts to Proxenus, the tyrants arrested those ambassadors of their own who had offered to hand over the garrison posts to you and when …

and on the same day the heralds of the Mysteries reported to you that the Phocians alone in all Hellas had refused the sacred truce, and had, furthermore, arrested the ambassadors who had been here.

And he gave you a sort of reckoning and enumeration of the days during which, while I was making my report on the embassy, the couriers of Phalaecus, the Phocian tyrant, were reporting to him how matters stood in Athens, while the Phocians, putting their trust in me, admitted Philip this side Thermopylae, and surrendered their own cities to him.

that the Thebans should be counterbalanced by the Phocians, and the Lacedaemonians by other communities;

the men who cannot protect their own country without your help?

It would not have been safe at Thebes, until he gave them back Boeotia and wiped out the Phocians.

Were you not deceived about Phocis, Thermopylae, the Thrace-ward districts, Doriscus, Serrium, Cersobleptes himself?

for there is a prize, honorable, great, and glorious, a prize for which the greatest of our states once spent all their time in contending, but since misfortune has dogged the Lacedaemonians, and the Phocian War has left the Thebans no leisure, and we are heedless, he has grasped it without a struggle.

then I am afraid that these separate powers, having each a private grudge, may make common cause against us on the strength of the Amphictyonic decrees, and may then be tempted to go beyond what their several interests require, as they were in the case of the Phocians.

Thirdly, men of Athens—and when I have given just this one further instance, I will at once pass on to some topics that I have omitted—when we ambassadors returned from administering the oaths for the peace, at that time there were some who assured us that Thespiae and Plataea would be rebuilt, that Philip, if he gained the mastery, would protect the Phocians and break up Thebes into villages, and …

For, quite apart from the disgrace that we should incur if we shirk our responsibilities, I see not a little danger, men of Athens, for the future, if the Thebans maintain their present attitude towards us, and the Phocians have come to the end of their money, and there is nothing to hinder Philip, when he has crushed his present foe, from turning his arms against Attica.

Again, when he was marching against the Phocians, he still pretended that they were his allies, and Phocian ambassadors accompanied him on his march, and most people here at Athens contended that his passage through Thermopylae would be anything but a gain to the Thebans.

Many could be named by the Orites, many by the Phocians, many by every ruined city.

So far from saying that, I date his hostility from the very day when he wiped out the Phocians.

And the difference is just this, that the orators consider in this case or in that—for instance, whether it is expedient for the Athenians to make war upon the Peloponnesians, or to help the Corcyraeans against the Corinthians, or for the Thebans to ally with Philip against the Phocians, or for Alexander to cross over into Asia.

With him went the horse-driving Boeotians, breathing above their shields, and the Locrians who fight hand to hand, and the gallant Phocians eager for war and battle.

The Thessalians, Phocians, Aetolians, and all the other peoples of the region, he made his allies, bringing under his control, by their own consent, the men whom Philip and Alexander gloried in controlling against their wish.

But the worst of their afflictions is that they live in continual fear that the Thebans may patch up their quarrel with the Phocians and, returning again, ring them about with still greater calamities than have befallen them in the past.

and, finally, they began war upon the Phocians, expecting that in a short time they would conquer their cities, occupy all the surrounding territory, and prevail over all the treasures at Delphi by the outlay of their own funds.

Heedless of all other considerations, they keep talking about your power, representing that it is being built up, not in behalf of Hellas, but against her, that you have for a long time been plotting against us all, and that, while you are giving it out that you intend to go to the rescue of the Messenians, if you can settle the Phocian question, you really design to subdue the Peloponnesus to your rule.