PHILIP RETURNS TO THE FRAY
[341-340 B.C.]
The warlike impulse in Athens did not long remain unknown to the Macedonian king. He concealed his anger so long as the Thracian War was still in progress; but when he had destroyed the once powerful Odrysian kingdom and secured the Thracian districts by means of colonies and garrisons, when he had led his army across the Hæmus to the Getæ and had won over the colonies on the western shore of the Pontus by conciliation or force, he proceeded to send the Athenians a defiant letter, full of complaints and accusations, and added to them such insults by marching into their possessions on the Chersonesus and seizing Athenian merchantmen, that the assembly of the people declared the peace to have been violated, threw down the peace column, and took measures to furnish substantial aid to the Byzantines whom Philip was even then threatening with a siege.
There was no delusion in Athens as to the importance of the step. When Hegesippus recommended the refusal of Philip’s last proposals, there was a cry “Thou art bringing war upon us,” whereupon he answered: “Not war alone, but early death and mourning garments and public burials and funeral orations if ye will give yourselves in earnest to free the Hellenes and win back the hegemony which your fathers maintained.”
Thus ended the hollow Peace of Philocrates which had lasted seven years, and although from the aspect of affairs and the previous course of events there could be no hope of a successful struggle of divided Hellas against the advancing power of the Macedonian kingdom, now in the youthful vigour of its military strength; yet we cannot but feel the deepest respect for the manly impulse, the resolution which defied death, and preferred to fall gloriously and honourably under the feet of hostile armies, rather than be any longer a prey to the deceitful trickery of the king and his purchased satellites, or hover any longer in the undignified and ruinous state between war and peace. It was not a question of preserving “a piece of finery which had grown old-fashioned,” but of saving liberty and the popular government handed down from their forefathers, of passing on unimpaired to their successors the institutions and political forms for which former generations had staked their property and their blood, and of avoiding the break with the great historical past as long as possible.