War & Peace Quote by Demosthenes

Fear of war, Demosthenes suggests, is not a peace policy but a vulnerability you can weaponize against yourself. The line is built like a trap: the verb "beware" frames caution as urgent, while "anxiety" names the real enemy as psychological, not military. Then comes the sting - "obtain a master" - a deliberately transactional verb for a political catastrophe. You do not merely fall into tyranny; you purchase it with concessions, timidity, and the seductive logic of "anything but conflict."

The context is Athens watching Philip II of Macedon expand and manipulate Greek city-states through bribery, diplomacy, and selective force. Demosthenes' project in the Philippics is to turn complacency into civic shame, arguing that the cost of avoiding immediate danger is a slower, more humiliating defeat. His subtext is aimed at the faction that treated accommodation as sophistication: the real naivete is thinking an aggressor will stop because you signal restraint.

Rhetorically, the quote works because it reframes peace as an active moral choice rather than a default condition. It also collapses time: the moment you "avoid war" by surrendering leverage, you have already entered another kind of war, one where the battlefield is your autonomy. For a democracy, "master" lands with extra menace. Demosthenes isn't romanticizing conflict; he's warning that unchecked fear turns citizens into subjects, and that the absence of fighting can still be the presence of domination.