he
Hellespont, he who demands earth and water from the Greeks, he who
in his letters presumes to style himself lord of all men from the
sunrise to the sunset, is he not struggling at this hour, no longer
for authority over others, but for his own life? Do you not see the
men who delivered the Delphian temple invested not only with that
glory but with the leadership against Persia? While Thebes--
Thebes, our neighbor city--has been in one day swept from the face
of Greece--justly it may be in so far as her general policy was
erroneous, yet in consequence of a folly which was no accident, but
the judgment of heaven. The unfortunate Lacedaemonians, though they
did but touch this affair in its first phase by the occupation of
the temple,--they who once claimed the leadership of Greece,--
are now to be sent to Alexander in Asia to give hostages, to parade
their disasters, and to hear their own and their country's doom from
his lips, when they have been judged by the clemency of the master
they provoked. Our city, the common asylum of the Greeks, from
which, of old, embassies used to come from all Greece to obtain
deliverance for their several cities at our hands, is now battling,
no more for the leadership of Greece, but for the ground on which it
stands. And these things have befallen us since Demosthenes took
the direction of our policy. The poet Hesiod will interpret such a
case. There is a passage meant to educate democracies and to
counsel cities generally, in which he warns us not to accept
dishonest leaders. I will recite the lines myself, the reason, I
think, for our learning the maxims of the poets in boyhood being
that we may use them as men:--

"Oft hath the bad man been the city's bane;
Oft hath his sin brought to the sinless pain:
Oft hath all-seeing Heaven sore vexed the town
With dearth and death and brought the people down;
Cast down their walls and their most valiant slain,
And on the seas made all their navies vain!"

Strip these lines of their poetic garb, look at them closely, and I
think you will say these are no mere verses of Hesiod--that they are
a prophecy of the administration of Demosthenes, for by the agency
of that administration our ships, our armies, our cities have been
swept from the earth. ... "O yes," it will be replied, "but then he
is a friend of the constitution." If, indeed, you have a regard
only to his delicacy you will be deceived as you were before, but
not