EARLIEST OLYNTHIAC. 328 stance to protect the rights of other Greeks that yon now shrink from personal service and payment of money for the de- fence of your own possessions. You, who have so often rescued others, can now sit still after having lost so much of your own ! I wonder you do not look back to that conduct of yours which haa brought your affairs into this state of ruin, and ask yourselves how they can ever mend, while such conduct remains unchanged. It was much easier at first to preserve what we once had, than to recover it now that it is lost ; we have nothing now left to lose we have everything to recover. This must be done by ourselves, and at once ; we must furnish money, we must serve in person by turns ; we must give our generals means to do their work well, and then exact from them a severe account afterwards which we cannot do so long as we ourselves will neither pay nor serve. We must correct that abuse which has grown up, whereby parti- cular symmories in the state combine to exempt themselves from burdensome duties, and to cast them all unjustly upon others. We must not only come forward vigorously and heartily, with person and with money, but each man must embrace faithfully his fair share of patriotic obligation." Such are the main points of the earliest discourse delivered by Demosthenes on the subject of Olynthus. In the mind of mod- ern readers, as in that of the rhetor Dionysius, 1 there is an un- conscious tendency to imagine that these memorable pleadings must have worked persuasion, and to magnify the efficiency of their author as an historical and directing person. But there are no facts to bear out such an impression. Demosthenes was still comparatively a young man thirty-one years of age ; admired indeed for his speeches and his compositions written to be spoken by others; 2 but as yet not enjoying much practical influence. It Dionys. Hal. ad Ammae. p. 736. peru yap ap rf elf fOSmAaa /?07?#af direaTethav ^A'&Tjvaloi, IT eia& EVT e f -bird A >?- ui. v&evov c , etc. He connects the three Olynthiacs of Demosthenes, with the three Athe- nian armaments sent to Olynthus in the year folio wing Midsummer 349 B. c.; for which armaments he had just before cited Philochorus. 2 This is evident from the sneers of Meidias : see the oration of Demos thenes cont. Meidiam, p. 575, 576. (spoken in the year following 349-348 u. C.) I observe, not without regret, that Demosthenes himself is not ashamed 28*
