Page:Demosthenes (Brodribb).djvu/130

116 their cities. You were at the head of the Greeks for seventy-three years, the Lacedæmonians for twenty-nine, and the Thebans had some power in these latter days after the battle of Leuctra. Yet neither you nor Lacedæmonians nor Thebans were ever licensed to act as you pleased. Far otherwise. When you, or rather the Athenians of that time, appeared to be dealing harshly with certain people, all the rest, even such as had no complaint against Athens, thought proper to side with the injured parties in a war against her. So, when the Lacedæmonians became masters and succeeded to your empire, on their attempting to encroach and make oppressive innovations, a general war was declared against them even by such as had no cause of complaint. But why mention other people? We ourselves and the Lacedæmonians, although at the outset we could not allege any mutual injuries, thought proper to make war for the injustice that we saw done to our neighbours. Yet all the faults committed by the Spartans in those thirty years, and by our ancestors in the seventy, are less than the wrongs which in thirteen incomplete years, while Philip has been uppermost, he has inflicted on the Greeks. Nay, they are scarcely a fraction of them, as I may easily and briefly show. Olynthus and Methone, and Apollonia and thirty-two cities on the borders of Thrace, I pass over—all which he has so cruelly destroyed that a visitor could scarcely tell if they were ever inhabited. And of Phocis, so considerable a people exterminated, I say nothing. But what is the condition of Thessaly? Has he not taken away her constitutions and her cities, and