Note 664 — Chapter LXXXVII · FROM THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE SACRED WAR TO THAT OF THE OLYNTHIAN WAR. (continued 2)

I adopt the date accepted by most critics, on the authority of Dionysius of Halikarnassus, to the first Philippic; the archonship of Aristodemus 352-351 B. C. It belongs, I think, to the latter half of that year.

The statements of Dionysius bearing on this oration have been much called in question; to a certain extent, with good reason, in what he states about the sixth Philippic (ad Ammæum, p. 736). What he calls the sixth, is in reality the fifth in his own enumeration, coming next after the first Philippic and the three Olynthiacs. To the Oratio De Pace, which is properly the sixth in his enumeration, he assigns no ordinal number whatever. What is still more perplexing—he gives as the initial words of what he calls the sixth Philippic, certain words which occur in the middle of the first Philippic, immediately after the financial scheme read by Demosthenes to the people, the words, Ἃ μὲν ἡμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, δεδυνήμεθα εὑρεῖν ταῦτ᾽ ἐστίν (Philipp. i. p. 48). If this were correct, we should have to divide the first Philippic into two parts, and recognize the latter part (after the words ἃ μὲν ἡμεῖς) as a separate and later oration. Some critics, among them Dr. Thirlwall, agree so far with Dionysius as to separate the latter part from the former, and to view it as a portion of some later oration. I follow the more common opinion, accepting the oration as one. There is a confusion, either in the text or the affirmations, of Dionysius, which has never yet been, perhaps cannot be, satisfactorily cleared up.

Böhnecke (in his Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Attischen Redner, p. 222 seq.) has gone into a full and elaborate examination of the first Philippic and all the controversy respecting it. He rejects the statement of Dionysius altogether. He considers that the oration as it stands now is one whole, but delivered three years later than Dionysius asserts: not in 351 B. C., but in the Spring of 348 B. C., after the three Olynthiacs, and a little before the fall of Olynthus. He notices various chronological points (in my judgment none of them proving his point) tending to show that the harangue cannot have been delivered so early as 351 B. C. But I think the difficulty of supposing that the oration was spoken at so late a period of the Olynthian war, and yet that nothing is said in it about that war, and next to nothing about Olynthus itself—is greater than any of those difficulties which Böhnecke tries to make good against the earlier date.