I perceive, men of Athens , that the
 present outlook gives rise to much vexation and perplexity, because not only
 have we suffered serious losses, which cannot be mended by fine speeches, but
 there is also complete divergence of opinion about the preservation of what is
 left of our empire, one favoring this policy, another that.

While deliberation is naturally a vexatious and difficult task, you, Athenians,
 have enhanced its difficulties; for all other people deliberate before the
 event, but you after the event. And the result is that, as long as I can
 remember, the man who attacks any mistakes you have made gains your applause as
 an able speaker, but meanwhile the events and the real object of your
 deliberation wholly escape you.

Nevertheless, although this is so, I have come forward in the belief and
 confidence that, if you will consent to still the noise of faction and listen
 with the attention that befits men who are debating the most important interests
 of the state, I shall be able to offer you advice which will ameliorate our
 present condition and redeem our past losses.

While I am well aware, Athenians, that to talk in this assembly about oneself and
 one’s own speeches is a very profitable practice, if one has the necessary
 effrontery, I feel that it is so vulgar and so offensive that, though I see the
 necessity, I shrink from it. I believe, however, that you will form a better
 judgement of what I am going to propose, if I remind you of a few things that I
 have said on former occasions.

For in the first place, Athenians, when it was proposed to take advantage of the
 unrest in Euboea and side with Plutarchus in a war that
 would bring us more expense than glory, I was the first and indeed the only
 speaker to oppose it, and I narrowly escaped being torn to pieces by those who
 induced you for trifling gains to commit many serious errors. It was not long
 before you incurred disgrace and suffered indignities such as no men
 have ever received from those whom they have helped, and so you realized the
 baseness of those to whom you then gave ear and the wisdom of the advice you
 received from me.

Again, men of Athens , when I saw that
 Neoptolemus, the actor, enjoying safe conduct under cover of his profession, was
 doing his best to injure our city and was Philip’s agent and representative at
 Athens , I once more came forward
 and addressed you, not out of private animosity or love of informing, as indeed
 my subsequent conduct has proved.

And I shall not in this case, as in the former one, find fault with those who
 spoke in defence of Neoptolemus, for not a man defended him, but with
 yourselves. For if it had been a tragedy in the theater of Dionysus that you
 were watching and not a debate on the very existence of your state, you could
 not have shown more partiality to him and more ill-will against me.

Yet I suppose that by this time you have all observed that after visiting the
 enemy, in order, as he alleged, to collect sums owing to him there which he
 might spend on public services here, and after making copious use of the
 argument that it was too bad to arraign men who were transferring wealth from
 Macedonia to Athens , he secured a safe conduct owing to
 the peace, converted into cash all the real property that he held here, and has
 absconded to Philip.

There, then, you have two of my warnings, bearing testimony to the value of my
 earlier speeches, and uttered by me honestly and in strict conformity with the
 facts. Thirdly, men of Athens—and when I have given just this one further
 instance, I will at once pass on to some topics that I have omitted—when we
 ambassadors returned from administering the oaths for the peace,

at that time there were some who assured us that Thespiae and Plataea would be rebuilt, that Philip, if he gained the
 mastery, would protect the Phocians and break up Thebes into villages, and that you would retain Oropus and
 receive Euboea in exchange for
 Amphipolis . Led on by these
 false hopes and cajoleries, you abandoned the Phocians against your own
 interests and against justice and honor. But you will find that I neither took
 part in this deception, nor passed it over in silence, but spoke out boldly, as
 I am sure you remember, saying that I had neither knowledge nor expectation of
 such results and that all such talk was nonsense.

Now all these instances, where I appear to have had a clearer foresight than the
 rest, I shall not refer to a single cause, men of Athens —my real or pretended cleverness ; nor will I claim that my knowledge and discernment
 were due to anything else than two things, which I will mention. One, men of
 Athens , was good luck, which my
 experience tells me is worth all the cleverness and wisdom in the world.

The second is this: on public questions my estimates and decisions are
 disinterested, and no one can show that my policy and my speeches have been in
 any way bound up with my private gain. Hence I always see accurately the
 advantageous course as suggested by actual circumstances. But the instant you
 throw money into one scale, its weight bears down the judgement with it; and for
 him that has once done this, accurate and sound calculation becomes utterly
 impossible.

Now there is one precaution which I think essential. If anyone proposes to
 negotiate for our city an alliance or a joint contribution or
 anything of the sort, it must be done without detriment to the existing peace. I
 do not mean that the peace is a glorious one or even creditable to you, but,
 whatever we may think of it, it would better suit our purpose never to have made
 it than to violate it when made, because we have now sacrificed many advantages
 which would have made war safer and easier for us then than now.

The second precaution, men of Athens, is to avoid giving the self-styled
 Amphictyons now assembled any call or excuse for a crusade against us. For if we
 should hereafter come to blows with Philip, about Amphipolis or in any private quarrel
 not shared by the Thessalians or the Argives or the Thebans, I do not believe
 for a moment that any of the latter would be dragged into the war, least of
 all—

hear me before you shout me down—least of all the Thebans. I do not mean that
 they regard us with favor or that they would not readily oblige Philip, but they
 do realize quite clearly, for all the stolidity that people attribute to them,
 that if they ever fight you, they will have to take all the hard knocks
 themselves, and someone else will sit quietly by, waiting for the spoils.
 Therefore they would never make such a sacrifice unless the war had a common
 cause and origin.

If we went to war again with the Thebans about Oropus or for some other private
 reason, I do not think we should suffer, for both their allies and ours would,
 of course, offer support, if their own territory were invaded, but would not
 join either side in aggression. That is the way with every alliance worth
 considering, and such is the natural result.

No individual ally is so fond either of us or of the Thebans as to regard our
 security and our supremacy in the same light. Secure they would all have us, for
 their own sakes; that either nation should gain supremacy and be their master
 would suit none of them. What, then, is the danger that I think we must guard
 against? Lest the inevitable war should afford all states a common pretext and a
 common ground of complaint.

For if the Argives and Messenians and Megalopolitans, and other Peloponnesians
 who side with them, quarrel with us because of our embassy to Sparta and because they think that we have
 some interest in Lacedaemonian policy; and if the Thebans are, as people admit,
 hostile and likely to be even more so, because we offer an asylum to their
 exiles and make no disguise of our hostility to them in every way;

and if the Thessalians dislike us because we protect the Phocian fugitives, and
 Philip because we are trying to exclude him from the Amphictyonic Council; then
 I am afraid that these separate powers, having each a private grudge, may make
 common cause against us on the strength of the Amphictyonic decrees, and may
 then be tempted to go beyond what their several interests require, as they were
 in the case of the Phocians.

For of course you realize that in the present case the Thebans and Philip and the
 Thessalians have acted in complete unison, though with widely different aims.
 The Thebans, for instance, were powerless to prevent Philip from pressing on and
 seizing the passes, or from coming in at the finish and usurping the credit of
 their previous exertions.

Hence today the Thebans have been partially successful in recovering territory,
 but have failed lamentably to win honor and glory; for they would presumably
 have gained nothing if Philip had not passed Thermopylae . That was not what they
 wanted, but they put up with it all because they had the will, though not the
 power, to grasp Orchomenus and
 Coronea .

Now some people actually go so far as to say that Philip was compelled, against
 his real wishes, to hand over Orchomenus and Coronea 
 to the Thebans. For my part I wish them joy of their opinion. I only know this,
 that Philip was less interested in those towns than desirous to secure the pass,
 to win for himself the credit of finishing off the Sacred War, and to preside at
 the Pythian games. That was the summit of his ambition.

But the Thessalians aimed at the aggrandizement neither of Thebes nor of Philip, because they felt
 that all that would tell against them; but they were anxious to control the
 council at Thermopylae and the
 Delphian temple —two clear gains for them; and it
 was this ambition that led them to join in the war. So you will find that each
 of these powers was induced for private reasons to do much that it did not wish.
 That, however, is emphatically what we must avoid.

Must we then, you ask, do as we are told for fear of the consequences? Do you
 of all men advise that? Far from it. No, I think we ought so to act as to do
 nothing unworthy of Athens and yet
 avoid war; we ought to show to all men our good sense and the justice of our
 claims. To those who think we ought boldly to risk everything, and who do not
 foresee the inevitable hostilities, I suggest the following consideration. We
 are allowing the Thebans to keep Oropus; and if anyone should ask us to tell him
 candidly why we do so, we should have to answer, In order to avoid war.

In the same way by agreement with Philip we have waived our claim to Amphipolis , and we are permitting
 Cardia to be excepted from the rest of the Chersonese , the Carian to occupy the
 islands of Chios , Cos, and Rhodes , and the Byzantines to detain our
 ships 
 in harbor, obviously because we think that the respite which the peace affords
 is more productive of advantages than wrangling and coming to blows over these
 points. Therefore it is sheer folly and perversity, after dealing with the
 powers one by one on matters of vital concern to ourselves, to challenge them
 all together to fight about this phantom at Delphi .