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"She is married," said Orestes, "to this Pylades, whom thou seest." "And of what country is he and who is his father?" "His father is Strophius the Phocian; and he is a kinsman, for his mother was the daughter of Atreus and a friend also such as none other is to me." Then Orestes set forth to his sister the cause of his coming to the land of the Taurians.
"It was there," answered the Phocian, "that the enemy killed the first of us; the rivulet by the city is called Hoplites." On hearing which the Spartan shed tears and observed, how impossible it is for any man to avoid his appointed lot; Lysander, it appears, having received an oracle, as follows: Sounding Hoplites see thou bear in mind, And the earthborn dragon following behind.
The Thebans were not ignorant what way their true interest pointed, but each of them had the evils of war before his eyes; for their Phocian wounds were still fresh upon them. However, the powers of the orator, as Theopompus tells us, rekindled their courage and ambition so effectually that all other objects were disregarded.
And to her, after a while, came Orestes, but disguised that no man might know him, and asked the Argive maidens that stood by, whether the house that he beheld was the palace of King Ægisthus, and when he heard that it was so, he bade them tell the King that certain Phocian strangers were come seeking him.
After this Pyrrhus, in other quarters also, put an end to the combat, imagining the Lacedaemonians would be inclined to yield, as almost all of them were wounded, and very great numbers killed outright; but the good fortune of the city, either satisfied with the experiment upon the bravery of the citizens, or willing to prove how much even in the last extremities such interposition may effect, brought, when the Lacedaemonians had now but very slender hopes left, Aminias, the Phocian, one of Antigonus's commanders, from Corinth to their assistance, with a force of mercenaries; and they were no sooner received into the town, but Areus, their king, arrived there himself, too, from Crete, with two thousand men more.
Their country bordered next upon Attica, they had great forces for the war, and at that time they were accounted the best soldiers of all Greece, but it was no easy matter to make them break with Philip, who, by many good offices, had so lately obliged them in the Phocian war; especially considering how the subjects of dispute and variance between the two cities were continually renewed and exasperated by petty quarrels, arising out of the proximity of their frontiers.
In the succeeding years, after Philip of Macedonia had put an end to the Phocian scandal, the Oracle was in reality in his hands—it was during this period that Demosthenes stigmatised it as the mouthpiece of Philip. In the succeeding centuries, too, it was dependent on the various rulers of Hellas and undoubtedly lost all public authority.
Demosthenes now enters upon an elaborate review of the history of Athens from the beginning of the Phocian war, his own relations thereto, and the charges of AEschines in connection therewith, fortifying his defence with numerous citations from public documents, and boldly arraigning the political principles and policy of his opponent, whom he accuses of being in frequent communication with the emissaries of Philip "a spy by nature, and an enemy to his country."
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