Philip was admitted to Thermopylæ, the beginning of all the subsequent mischief. If it was dreadful to think of Greece being under a foreign master, it was a glorious fact that Athens had done her best to avert such a disgrace.
This is the drift and purport of the great speech on the Crown, as it is usually called. It has been well described by Mr Grote as "a funeral oration on extinct Athenian and Grecian freedom." "It breathes," says Dr Thirlwall, "the spirit of that high philosophy which, whether learnt in the schools or from life, has consoled the noblest of our kind in prisons and on scaffolds, and under every persecution of adverse fortune, but in the tone necessary to impress a mixed multitude with a like feeling, and to elevate it for a while into a sphere above its own."
Some passages from this oration have already been quoted in the preceding chapter; and it is due to the reader to give him some further specimens of, perhaps, the greatest of all the oratorical efforts of Demosthenes.
Here is a passage in which the speaker dwells on the generous and magnanimous temper of his countrymen in their best days:—
"Let me for a moment bring before your eyes one or two of the brightest passages in the history of our times. Lacedæmon was paramount by sea and land; she had a belt of garrisons about the frontiers of our territory; Eubœa, Tanagra, all Bœotia, Megara, Ægina, Cleonæ, every island on the coast. We had neither
