37
This is the direction your fears should take, Antipater; never mind all the war-ships and all the fleets. What Themistocles and Pericles were to the Athens of old, that is Demosthenes to Athens to-day, as shrewd as Themistocles, as high of soul as Pericles, He tt was that gained them the control of Euboea and Megara, the Hellespont and Boeotia, It is well indeed that they give the command to such as Chares or Diopithes or Proxenus, and keep, Demosthenes to the platform at home. If they had given into his bands their arms and ships and troops, their strategy and their money, I doubt he would have put me on my mettle to keep Macedonta; even now that be has no weapon but bis decrees, he is with us at every turn, bis hand ts upon us; the ways and means are of his finding, the force of his gathering; it is he that sends armadas afar, he that joins power to power, he that meets our every change of plan.
38
This was his tone about Demosthenes on many other occasions too; he put it down as one of his debts to fortune that armies were never led by the man whose mere words were so many battering-rams and catapults worked from Athens to the shattering and confounding of his plans. As to Chaeronea, even the victory made no difference; he continued to impress upon us how precarious a position this one man had contrived for us. Things went unexpectedly well; their generals were cowards and their troops undisciplined, and the caprice of fortune, which bas so often served us well, brought us out victorious; but he had reduced me to hazarding my kingdom and my life on that single throw; he had brought the most powerful cities into line, he had united Greece, he had forced Athens and Thebes and all Boeotia, Corinth, Euboea, Megara—the might of Greece, in short—to play the game out to its end, and had arrested me before I reached Attic soil.
