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Updated: June 29, 2025
But the Grecian States had no general able to cope with him on the land, while he created a navy to annoy the Athenians at sea. They were his neighbors, and had been his allies; but the expulsion of the Athenians from the coast of Thrace and Macedonia now alarmed the Olynthians, together with the increasing power of Philip, so that they concluded a treaty of peace with Athens.
He had distrusted Philip from the very first, and had kept warning the Athenians that the King of Macedon was very ambitious, and would soon try to become master of all Greece. When the Olynthians asked for aid, he had warmly urged the Athenians to give it, saying that they ought to bring on the conflict with Philip as soon as possible, so that the fighting might be done outside of Greece.
They sent embassies to Athens, seeking aid, and Demosthenes supported their cause in the three "Olynthiac Orations," which roused the Athenians to more vigorous efforts. But the latter were divided in their counsels, and the aid they gave the Olynthians was inefficient.
For example, to the Olynthians he declared, when he was forty furlongs from their city, that there was no alternative, but either they must quit Olynthus or he Macedonia; though before that time, whenever he was accused of such an intent, he took it ill and sent embassadors to justify himself.
The Mecybernaeans, Sanaeans, and Singaeans shall inhabit their own cities, as also the Olynthians and Acanthians: but the Lacedaemonians and their allies shall give back Panactum to the Athenians.
So, in spite of all that Demosthenes could say, they did not offer any great resistance to Philip, who little by little became a very powerful king. When Philip had entirely subdued the Thracians and Olynthians, he helped the Thessalians to get rid of their tyrant; and, adding their cavalry to his infantry, he boasted of as fine an army as the Greeks had ever been able to muster.
But when he marches to attack us, what shall we say then? He will assure us that he is not making war, as he assured the Orites, when his troops were in their country, as he assured the Pheraeans before he assaulted their walls, and the Olynthians in the first instance, until he was in their territories with his army. Shall we then say, that persons who bid us defend ourselves kindle a war?
In this same winter Mecyberna was assaulted and taken by the Olynthians, having an Athenian garrison inside it.
Nor is this instance of the unmixed evil wrought by these practices in the case of the Olynthians an exceptional one, or without parallel elsewhere. And through listening mainly, or rather entirely, to the latter, these poor luckless Eretrians were at last persuaded to banish the advocates of their own interests. And why go through the mass of the instances?
For it is plain to the Olynthians, that now they are fighting, not for glory or a slice of territory, but to save their country from destruction and servitude. It had been built formerly by an Athenian colony, and was taken by the Spartan general Brasidas in the Peloponnesian war.
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