‘If you grasp the situation as I have indicated, and cease to make light of everything, it may be, it may be that even now our affairs may take a favourable turn; but if you continue to sit still and confine your enthusiasm to expressions of applause and votes of approval, but shirk the issue when any action is required of you, I cannot conceive of any eloquence which, without performance of your duty, can guide our State to safety.’[315] The _Third Philippic_ was delivered in the same year (341 B.C.). The situation is in all essentials the same. Demosthenes again demands that help should be sent to the Chersonese and the safety of Byzantium assured; but he does not enlarge on these points, which have been treated by previous speakers.[316] ‘We must help them, it is true, and take care that no harm befalls them; but our deliberations must be about the great danger which now threatens the whole of Greece.’[317] It is this breadth of view which distinguishes the _Third Philippic_, and makes it the greatest of all the public harangues. In the _Chersonese_ Demosthenes had suggested the dispatch of numerous embassies; he now enlarges on this topic; the interests of Athens must be identified with those of all Greece, and all States must be made to realize this. Philip’s designs are against Greek liberty as a whole; Athens must arm and put herself at the head of a great league in the struggle for freedom. ‘I pass over Olynthus, Methone, and Apollonia, and thirty-two cities in the Thracian district, all of which he has so brutally destroyed that it is hard for a visitor to say whether they were ever inhabited. I am silent about the destruction of a great nation, the Phocians. But how fares Thessaly? Has he not deprived the cities of their governments, and established tetrarchies, in order that they may be enslaved, not only city by city, but tribe by tribe? Are not the cities of Euboea now ruled by tyrants, though that island is close on the borders of Thebes and Athens? Does he not expressly state in his letters “I am at peace with those who will obey me”? And his actions corroborate his words. He has started for the Hellespont; before that he visited Ambracia; he holds in the Peloponnese the important city of Elis; only the other day he made plots against Megara. Neither Greece nor the countries beyond it can contain his ambition.’[318] This short extract is a fair example of Demosthenes’ vigorous use of historical argument, but it can give little idea of the speech as a whole. It abounds, indeed, in enumerations of recent events bearing on the case, and in contrasts between the present and the past. This running appeal to example to a great extent takes the place of reasoned argument, but the effect of the whole, with its combined appeals to feeling and reason, is convincingly strong.