interfering actively in Greek politics. Membership of the Amphictyonic Council was, in fact, equivalent to naturalisation. Philip was now, in theory at least, a Greek, and no longer a barbarian. The Athenian Isocrates could, with a show of reason, address a letter to him, inviting him to reconcile under his leadership the great states of Greece, and invade Asia with a view to the overthrow of the Persian empire and the liberation of the Asiatic Greeks. But the Athenians generally felt deep anger and vexation at the issue of events, and could hardly make up their minds to sit still under the disgrace of the surrender of Thermopylæ and the intrusion of a foreign prince into the heart of Greece.
Demosthenes, as has been said, had no sympathy with the ideas of Isocrates. He still clung to the belief in a general independent Greek world, of which his own state ought to be the most perfect representative. Yet on this occasion he spoke in favour of the inglorious peace just concluded. Miserable as it was, he argued that to break it would be to give Philip a pretext for uniting other Greek states in war against them. The tone of his speech is confident and decided. The peace was bad and dishonourable, no doubt, but to repudiate it would be simply madness. It would be putting themselves gratuitously in the wrong. "The shadow at Delphi," as he calls the subject of the Sacred war which had been waged between Thebes and Phocis, was not worth fighting for, more especially when they would have to fight a Greek confederacy. It could not have been altogether pleasant to Demosthenes
