The Athenian peace-establishment maintained more ships of war, larger docks, and better-stored arsenals, than any city in Greece, besides expending forty talents annually upon the Horsemen of the state, and doubtless something farther (though we know not how much) upon the other descriptions of military force. All this, let it be observed, and the Theôric expenditure besides, was defrayed without direct taxation, which was reserved for the extraordinary cost incident to a state of war, and was held to be sufficient to meet it, without any accumulated war-fund. When the war against Philip became serious, the proprietary classes at Athens, those included in the schedule of assessment, were called upon to defray the expense by a direct tax, from which they had been quite free in time of peace. They tried to evade this burthen by requiring that the festival-fund should be appropriated instead;[769] thus menacing what was dearest to the feelings of the majority of the citizens. The ground which they took was the same in principle, as if the proprietors in France or Belgium claimed to exempt themselves from direct taxation for the cost of a war, by first taking either all or half of the annual sum voted out of the budget for the maintenance of religion.[770] We may judge how strong a feeling would be raised among the Athenian public generally, by the proposal of impoverishing the festival expenditure in order to save a property-tax. Doubtless, after the proprietary class had borne a certain burthen of direct taxation, their complaints would become legitimate. The cost of the festivals could not be kept up undiminished, under severe and continued pressure of war. As a second and subsidiary resource, it would become essential to apply the whole or a part of the fund in alleviation of the burthens of the war. But even if all had been so applied, the fund could not have been large enough to dispense with the necessity of a property-tax besides.

We see this conflict of interests,—between direct taxation on one side, and the festival-fund on the other as a means of paying for war,—running through the Demosthenic orations, and especially marked in the fourth Philippic.[771] Unhappily, the conflict served as an excuse to both parties for throwing the blame on each other, and starving the war; as well as for giving effect to the repugnance, shared by both rich and poor, against personal military service abroad. Demosthenes sides with neither, tries to mediate between them, and calls for patriotic sacrifice from both alike. Having before him an active and living enemy, with the liberties of Greece as well as of Athens at stake,—he urges every species of sacrifice at once—personal service, direct-tax payments, abnegation of the festivals. Sometimes the one demand stands most prominent, sometimes the other; but oftenest of all, comes his appeal for personal service. Under such military necessities, in fact the Theôric expenditure became mischievous, not merely because it absorbed the public money, but also because it chained the citizens to their home and disinclined them to active service abroad. The great charm and body of sentiment connected with the festival, essentially connected as it was with presence in Attica, operated as a bane; at an exigency when one-third or one-fourth of the citizens ought to have been doing hard duty as soldiers on the coasts of Macedonia or Thrace, against an enemy who never slept. Unfortunately for the Athenians, they could not be convinced, by all the patriotic eloquence of Demosthenes, that the festivals which fed their piety and brightened their home-existence during peace, were unmaintainable during such a war, and must be renounced for a time, if the liberty and security of Athens were to be preserved. The same want of energy which made them shrink from the hardship of personal service, also rendered them indisposed to so great a sacrifice as that of their festivals; nor indeed would it have availed them to spare all the cost of their festivals, had their remissness as soldiers still continued. Nothing less could have saved them, than simultaneous compliance with all the three requisitions urged by Demosthenes in 350 B. C.; which compliance ultimately came, but came too late, in 339-338 B. C.