[22]
And what of the Thessalians? Do you
imagine,” I said, “that when he was expelling their despots,
or again when he was presenting them with Nicaea and Magnesia,
they ever dreamed that a Council of Ten1 would be established among
them, as it is today, or that the same man who restored to them the Amphictyonic
meeting at Thermopylae would
also appropriate their own peculiar revenues? Impossible! But so it came to
pass, as all men may know.
1 According to Dem. 9.26 Philip set up >tetrarchies in Thessaly. The two accounts may be reconciled by assuming that he retained the old fourfold division of the country, but set up an oligarchy of ten in each division. Philip, whose policy was to divide and conquer, would be unlikely to centralize the government. It is just possible that δεκαδαρχίαν may be a mistaken amplification of Δ᾽αρχίαν=τετραρχίαν, but in that case the singular would be strange. Owing to the decarchies which Lysander imposed on so many free cities at the end of the Peloponnesian war, the number ten would have the same sinister associations in Greece as it had at Rome and at Venice.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by J. H. Vince, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1930.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.