If you lend not the utmost possible aid, see how you will have manoeuvred every thing for Philip's benefit.
Demosthenes: “If you lend not the utmost possible aid, see how you will have manoeuvred every thing for Philip's benefit.”
Editor's note · Context
In a speech advocating for immediate military assistance to Olynthus, Demosthenes warns that inaction will only serve Philip's strategic interests.
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Yea, among these men, some have risen rapidly from poverty to wealth, from meanness and obscurity to repute and honor, while you, on the contrary, have fallen from honor to obscurity, from wealth to indigence.
Such is the truth, spoken with perfect freedom, purely from good-will and for the best: not a speech fraught with flattery and mischief and deceit, to earn money for the speaker, and to put the commonwealth into the hands of our enemies.
You can not surely allege, that Aristodemus ought to be of importance at Athens, and Athens to be of no account among the Greeks.
Because our city is the only one where liberty is allowed to speak for the enemy, where a man taking a bribe may safely address the people, though they have been deprived of their possessions.





