Page:History of Greece Vol XI.djvu/56

 30 HISTORY OF GREECE. cian cities ; but it is now high time that these cities should unite cordially to oppose farther ruin. How can Sparta, our legitimate president, sit still while the Hellenic world is on fire and consum- ing ? The misfortunes of our ruined brethren ought to be to us as our own. Lei us not lie idle, waiting until Artaxerxes and Diony- sius attack us with their united force : let us check their insolence at once, while it is yet in our power." ' Unfortunately we possess but a scanty fragment of this em phatic harangue (a panegyrical harangue, in the ancient sense of the word) delivered at Olympia by Lysias. But we see the alarming picture of the time which he labored to impress : Hellas already enslaved, both in the east and in the west, by the two greatest potentates of the age, 2 Artaxerxes and Dionysius and now threatened in her centre by their combined efforts. To feel the full probability of so gloomy an anticipation, we must recollect that only in the preceding year Dionysius, already master of Sic- ily and of a considerable fraction of Italian Greece, had stretched his naval force across to Illyria, armed a host of Illyrian barba- rians, and sent them southward under Alketas against the Molos- sians, with the view of ultimately proceeding farther and pillaging the Delphian temple. The Lacedaemonians had been obliged to send a force to arrest their progress. 3 No wonder then that Lysias should depict the despot of Syracuse as meditating ulterior pro- jects against Central Greece ; and as an object not only of hatred for what he bud done, but of terror for what he was about to do, in conjunction with the other great enemy from the east. 4 1 Lysias, Orat. Frag. I. c. Qav/tdfa (3 AaKsdacftovinvf TTUVTUV fiultora, TIVI TTOTE yvuiiij xpufievoi, K.aio[iivr}v TJ)V 'EAAucJa ttepiop&CLv, ^yf/xdvff ovrtf TUV ''E^fjvuv, oitK udiKUf, etc. Oil yap u^orpiaf del rue TUV airnTiu^oTuv (nyz^opuf vopi&iv, iM? o'tKtlaf ' ovd 1 uvapelvai, uf uv kit 1 at>rot)f ?///uf al dvvufieie ufttyore- puv IMruaiv, a A./T luf 2rt E^EOTI^T^V TOVTUV vftpiv KU?*.V- aai. I give 5n the text the principal points of what remains out of this dis- course of Lysias, without confining myself to the words. 4 Isokrates holds similar language, both about the destructive conquests of Dionysius, and the past sufferings and. present danger of Hellas, in his Oral. IV. (Panegyric.) composed about 380 B. c, and (probably enough)
 * Di^dor. xv. 23. oi fiiyioTOL T&V TOTE 6vvaariJv, etc.
 * Diodor. xv. 13.