SELECTIONS FOR PRACTISE CLOSE OF THE ORATION ON THE CROWN BY DEMOSTHENES The people gave their voice, and the danger that hung upon our borders went by like a cloud. Then was the time for the upright citizen to show the world if he could suggest anything better:-now, his cavils come too late. The statesman and the adventurer are alike in nothing, but there is nothing in which they differ more than this. The statesman declares his mind before the event, and submits himself to be tested by those who have believed him, by fortune, by his own use of opportunities, by every one and everything. The adventurer is silent when he ought to have spoken, and then, if there is a disagreeable result, he fixes an eye of malice upon that. As I have said, then was the opportunity of the man who cared for Athens and for the assertion of justice. But I am prepared to go further:-If any one has had a new light as to something which it would have been expedient to do then, I protest that this ought not to be concealed from me. But if there neither is nor was any such thing; if no one to this very hour is in a position to name it; then what was your adviser to do? Was he not to choose the best of the visible and feasible alternatives? And this is what I did, Eschines, when the herald asked, "Who wishes to speak?" His question was not, Who wishes to rake up old accusations? or, Who wishes to give pledges of the future? In those days you sat dumb in the assemblies. I came forward and spoke. Come now-it is better late than never: point out what argument should have been discovered-what opportunity that might have served has not been used by me in the interests of Athens-what alliance, what policy was available which I might better have commended to our citizens? As, however, he bears so hardly upon the results, I am ready to make a statement which may sound startling. I say that, if the event had been manifest to the whole world beforehand, if all men had been fully aware of it, if you, Eschines, who never opened your lips, had been ever so loud or so shrill in prophecy or in protest, not even then ought Athens to have forsaken this course, if Athens had any regard for her glory, or for her past, or for the ages to come. Now, of course, she seems to have failed; but failure is for all men when Heaven so decrees. In the other case, she, who claims the first place in Greece, would have renounced it, and would have incurred the reproach of having betrayed all Greece to Philip. If she had indeed betrayed without a blow those things for which our ancestors endured every imaginable danger, who would not have spurned, Æschines, at you? Not at Athens-the gods forbid-nor at me. In the name of Zeus, how could we have looked visitors in the face if, things having come to their present pass, Philip having been elected leader and lord of all—the struggle against it had been sustained by others without our help, and this, tho never once in her past history our city had preferred inglorious safety to the perilous vindication of honor? What Greek, what barbarian |