Page:History of Greece Vol XI.djvu/335

 MRST PHILIPPIC. 309 allies to whom she owed protection, combinod with accusations against the generals, and complaints of the inefficiency of such mercenary foreigners as Athens took into commission but never paid, still, the recognized public advisers shrank from appeal to the dormant patriotism or personal endurance of the citizens. The serious, but indispensable, duty which they thus omitted, was performed for them by a younger competitor, far beneath them in established footing and influence, Demosthenes, now about thirty years old, in an harangue, known as the first Philippic. We have already had before us this aspiring man, as a public adviser in the assembly. In his first parliamentary harangue two years before, 1 he had begun to inculcate on his countrymen the 1 I adopt the date accepted by most critics, on the authority of Dionysius of Halikarnassus, to the first Philippic ; the archonship of Aristodeinus 352-351 B. c. It belongs, I think, to the latter half of that year. The statements of Dionysius bearing on this oration have been much called in question ; to a certain extent, with good reason, in what he states about the sixth Philippic (ad Ammamm, p. 736). What he calls the sixth, is in reality the fifth in his own enumeration, coming next after the first Phi- lippic and the three Olynthiacs. To the Oratio De Pace, which is properly the sixth in his enumeration, he assigns no ordinal number whatever. What is still more perplexing he gives as the initial words of what he calls the sixth Philippic, certain words which occur in the middle of the first Philip- pic, immediately after the financial scheme read by Demosthenes to the people, the words, "A pev #//etf, u avdpef 'Atf^vatot, dedwrjueda. evpelv, ratir' kariv (Philipp. i. p. 48). If this were correct, we should have to divide the first Philippic into two parts, and recognize the latter part (after the words ii filv 7/fj.ftf) as a separate and later oration. Some critics, among them Dr. Thirlwall, agree so far with Dionysius as to separate the latter part from the former, and to view it as a portion of some later oration. I follow the more common opinion, accepting the oration as one. There is a confusion, either in the text or the affirmations, of Dionysius, which has never yet been, perhaps cannot be, satisfactorily cleared up. Bohnecke (in his Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Attischen Redner, p. 222 seq.) has gone into a full and elaborate examination of the first Phi- lippic and all the controversy respecting it. He rejects the statement of Dionysius altogether. He considers that the oration as it stands now is one whole, but delivered three years later than Dionysius asserts : not in 351 B. c., but in the Spring of 348 B. c., after the three Olynthiacs, and a little before the fall of Olynthus. He notices various chronological points (in my judgment none of them proving his point) tending to show that the ha- rangue cannot have been delivered so early as 351 B. c. But I think the difficulty of supposing that the oration was spoken at so late a period of live