The state of public feeling in Athens at the close of the Phocian war, may be easily conceived. It was a struggle between fear and resentment. Fear of an enemy who had been irritated by a long conflict, had become more powerful than ever, and, while his forces had been brought nearer to the confines of Attica than they had ever before advanced, had given a fresh specimen, in the political extinction of another Grecian state, of the fearful lengths to which his animosity might be carried, or to which he might even be led by the cool calculations of his ambitious policy. Resentment, which was so much the keener, because the injury that provoked it was one which afforded but slight ground for remonstrance, or even for complaint. One of the consequences of this state of feeling was, that the peace just concluded, though almost universally admitted to be necessary, became generally odious, and its authors and promoters–the orators who proposed and recommended it, and the negotiators who brought it about–extremely unpopular. Demosthenes, as one of the ambassadors who had been engaged in this business, must have shared the odium to which his colleagues were exposed, if he had not been able to separate his case from theirs, and if the whole tenor of his past public life had not exempted him from all suspicions of a leaning toward the Macedonian interest.