Philippic could represent the current state of affairs as having been caused by those who advised
appeasement of Philip. The implication, of course, is that Demosthenes was right all along and so now the
assembly, which Demosthenes rebukes as prone to being supine, should follow his sensible advice. This
is the same technique we saw in Thucydides (p. 170), who assures his reader of his own competence as
an analyst by revealing his successful prediction regarding the magnitude of the Peloponnesian War.
Demosthenes further hammers home his point by emphasizing Philip’s lack of those qualities that
characterize a civilized, that is to say a Greek, head of state.

Philip II of Macedon and the Subjugation of Greece

While Isocrates encouraged Philip to lead the Greeks against the barbarians, according to Demosthenes
Philip was himself a barbarian, and the only way to deal with people like that is by decisive military
action, not negotiation. Demosthenes tried to rouse his Athenian audience to a frenzy of indignation by
pointing out the absurdity of Philip’s presiding over the Pythian games, as he was invited to do by the
Delphic authorities in 346 and again in 342 BC. For the Pythian games were a Panhellenic festival, to be
celebrated only by Greeks, as Demosthenes goes out of his way to point out. But the question of whether
Philip, and the Macedonians in general, were Greeks or non-Greeks is by no means straightforward.
Indeed, it is still today the cause of animated debate between the people of the region of Macedonia in
northern Greece and the people of the state admitted to membership in the United Nations in 1993 under
the provisional name “The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” There is no question that, in the
fifth and fourth centuries BC, there were noticeable differences between the Greeks and the Macedonians:
The latter did not live in a polis, they were ruled by a king, and their speech distinguished them from the
Greeks. Unfortunately, the written remains from Macedon are so scanty that linguists today cannot agree
whether Macedonian was a dialect of Greek or a separate language closely related to Greek. In fact, the
terms “dialect” and “language” are themselves subject to controversy, and language was once defined by
a speaker of Yiddish as “a dialect with an army and navy.” In other words, the issue was (and is) an
entirely political one. Demosthenes wished, for his own political purposes, to persuade the Athenian
assembly that Philip was not Greek. On the other hand, Philip, like some of the earlier Macedonian kings,
sought for political purposes to present himself as Greek. By presiding over the Panhellenic Pythian
games, he was asserting his Greek identity, just as his ancestor, Alexander I, had done early in the fifth
century by entering the Olympic games as a contestant. His right to compete had been challenged on the
grounds that he was not Greek, but Alexander somehow managed to “prove” to the Hellenodikai that he
was descended from the Greek hero Heracles and he was therefore permitted to compete. This, however,
still left uncertain the Greek status of those Macedonians who were not members of the royal family.