Page:History of Greece Vol XI.djvu/533

PEACE OF DEMADES. 507 orated his triumph over Grecian liberty. 1 At length Demades with the other envoys returned to Athens, reporting the consent of Philip to conclude peace, to give back the numerous prisoners in his hands, and also to transfer Oropus from the Thebans to Athens. Demades proposed the conclusion of peace to the Athenian assembly, by whom it was readily decreed. To escape invasion and siege by the Macedonian army, was doubtless an unspeaka- ble relief; while the recovery of the two thousand prisoners with- out ransom, was an acquisition of great importance, not merely to the city collectively, but to the sympathies of numerous relatives. Lastly, to regain Oropus a possession which they had once en- joyed, and for which they had long wrangled with the Thebans was a farther cause of satisfaction. Such conditions were doubt- less acceptable at Athens. But there was a submission to be made on the other side, which to the contemporaries of Perikles would have seemed intolerable, even as the price of averted inva- sion or recovered captives. The Athenians were required to ac- knowledge the exaltation of Philip to the headship of the Gre- cian world, and to promote the like acknowledgment by all other Greeks, in a congress to be speedily convened. They were to renounce all pretensions of headship, not only for themselves, but for every other Grecian state ; to recognize not Sparta or Thebes, but the king of Macedon, as Pan-hellenic chief; to acquiesce in the transition of Greece from the position of a free, self-deter- mining, political aggregate, into a provincial dependency of the kings of Pella and ^Egae. It is not easy to conceive a more terrible shock to that traditional sentiment of pride and patriotism, inher- ited from forefathers, who, after repelling and worsting the Per- sians, had first organized the maritime Greeks into a confederacy running parallel with and supplementary to the non-maritime Greeks allied with Sparta ; thus keeping out foreign dominion and casting the Grecian world into a system founded on native sympathies and free government. Such traditional sentiment, though it no longer governed the character of the Athenians or impressed upon them motives of action, had still a strong hold upon their imagination and memory, where it had been constant- 1 Demosth. DC Corouft, p. 321.