Aeschines. Aeschines with an English translation by Charles Darwin Adams, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1919.
I have never, fellow citizens, brought indictment against any Athenian, nor vexed any man when he was rendering account of his office1); but in all such matters I have, as I believe, shown myself a quiet and modest man.2) But when I saw that the city was being seriously injured by the defendant, Timarchus, who, though disqualified by law, was speaking in your assemblies,3) and when I myself was made a victim of his blackmailing attack—the nature of the attack I will show in the course of my speech—
I decided that it would be a most shameful thing if I failed to come to the defence of the whole city and its laws, and to your defence and my own; and knowing that he was liable to the accusations that you heard read a moment ago by the clerk of the court, I instituted this suit, challenging him to official scrutiny. Thus it appears,fellow citizens, that what is so frequently said of public suits is no mistake, namely, that very often private enmities correct public abuses.
You will see, then, that Timarchus cannot blame the city for any part of this prosecution, nor can he blame the laws, nor you, nor me, but only himself. For because of his shameful private life the laws forbade him to speak before the people, laying on him an injunction not difficult, in my opinion, to obey—nay, most easy; and had he been wise, he need not have made his slanderous attack upon me. I hope, therefore, that in this introduction I have spoken as a quiet and modest citizen ought to speak.
I am aware, fellow citizens, that the statement which I am about to make first is something that you will undoubtedly have heard from other men on other occasions; but I think the same thought is especially timely on this occasion, and from me. It is acknowledged, namely, that there are in the world three forms of government, autocracy, oligarchy, and democracy: autocracies and oligarchies are administered according to the tempers of their lords, but democratic states according to established laws.
And be assured, fellow citizens, that in a democracy it is the laws that guard the person of the citizen and the constitution of the state, whereas the despot and the oligarch find their protection in suspicion and in armed guards. Men, therefore, who administer an oligarchy, or any government based on inequality, must be on their guard against those who attempt revolution by the law of force; but you, who have a government based upon equality and law, must guard against those whose words violate the laws or whose lives have defied them; for then only will you be strong, when you cherish the laws, and when the revolutionary attempts of lawless men shall have ceased.
And it behooves us, I think, not only when we are enacting laws, to consider always how the laws that we make may be good and advantageous to the democracy, but when once we have enacted them, it equally behooves us, if all is to be well with the state, to obey the laws that we have enacted, and to punish those who do not obey them.
Consider, fellow citizens, how much attention that ancient lawgiver, Solon, gave to morality, as did Draco and the other lawgivers of those days.
First, you recall, they laid down laws to protect the morals of our children, and they expressly prescribed what were to be the habits of the freeborn boy, and how he was to be brought up; then they legislated for the lads, and next for the other age-groups in succession, including in their provision, not only private citizens, but also the public men. And when they had inscribed these laws, they gave them to you in trust, and made you their guardians.
Now it is my desire, in addressing you on this occasion, to follow in my speech the same order which the lawgiver followed in his laws. For you shall hear first a review of the laws that have been laid down to govern the orderly conduct of your children, then the laws concerning the lads, and next those concerning the other ages in succession, including not only private citizens, but the public men as well. For so, I think, my argument will most easily be followed. And at the same time I wish, fellow citizens, first to describe to you in detail the laws of the state, and then in contrast with the laws to examine the character and habits of Timarchus. For you will find that the life he has lived has been contrary to all the laws.
In the first place, consider the case of the teachers. Although the very livelihood of these men, to whom we necessarily entrust our own children, depends on their good character, while the opposite conduct on their part would mean poverty, yet it is plain that the lawgiver distrusts them; for he expressly prescribes, first, at what time of day the free-born boy is to go to the school-room; next, how many other boys may go there with him, and when he is to go home.
He forbids the teacher to open the school-room, or the gymnastic trainer the wrestling school, before sunrise, and he commands them to close the doors before sunset; for he is exceeding suspicious of their being alone with a boy, or in the dark with him. He prescribes what children are to be admitted as, pupils, and their age at admission. He provides for a public official who shall superintend them, and for the oversight of slave-attendants of school-boys. He regulates the festivals of the Muses in the school-rooms, and of Hermes in the wrestling-schools. Finally, he regulates the companionships that the boys may form at school, and their cyclic dances.4
He prescribes, namely, that the choregus, a man who is going to spend his own money for your entertainment, shall be a man of more than forty years of age when he performs this service, in order that he may have reached the most temperate time of life before he comes into contact with your children.
These laws, then, shall be read to you, to prove that the lawgiver believed that it is the boy who has been well brought up that will be a useful citizen when he becomes a man. But when a boy's natural disposition is subjected at the very outset to vicious training, the product of such wrong nurture will be, as he believed, a citizen like this man Timarchus. Read these laws to the jury.
“Laws
[The teachers of the boys shall open the school-rooms not earlier than sunrise, and they shall close them before sunset. No person who is older than the boys shall be permitted to enter the room while they are there, unless he be a son of the teacher, a brother, or a daughter's husband. If any one enter in violation of this prohibition, he shall be punished with death. The superintendents of the gymnasia shall under no conditions allow any one who has reached the age of manhood to enter the contests of Hermes together with the boys. A gymnasiarch who does permit this and fails to keep such a person out of the gymnasium, shall be liable to the penalties prescribed for the seduction of free-born youth. Every choregus who is appointed by the people shall be more than forty years of age.]”
Now after this, fellow citizens, he lays down laws regarding crimes which, great as they undoubtedly are, do actually occur, I believe, in the city. For the very fact that certain unbecoming things were being done was the reason for the enactment of these laws by the men of old. At any rate the law says explicitly: if any boy is let out for hire as a prostitute, whether it be by father or brother or uncle or guardian, or by any one else who has control of him, prosecution is not to he against the boy himself, but against the man who let him out for hire and the man who hired him; against the one because he let him out for hire, and against the other, it says, because he hired him. And the law has made the penalties for both offenders the same. Moreover the law frees a son, when he has become a man, from all obligation to support or to furnish a home to a father by whom he has been hired out for prostitution; but when the father is dead, the son is to bury him and perform the other customary rites.
See, gentlemen, how admirably this legislation fits the case; so long as the father is alive he is deprived of all the benefits of fatherhood, precisely as he deprived his son of a citizen's right to speak;5 but when he is dead, and unconscious of the service that is being rendered him, and when it is the law and religion that receive the honor, then at last the lawgiver commands the son to bury him and perform the other customary rites.
But what other law has been laid down for the protection of your children? The law against panders. For the lawgiver imposes the heaviest penalties if any person act as pander in the case of a free-born child or a free-born woman.
And what other law? The law against outrage, which includes all such conduct in one summary statement, wherein it stands expressly written: if any one outrage a child （and surely he who hires, outrages） or a man or woman, or any one, free or slave, or if he commit any unlawful act against any one of these. Here the law provides prosecution for outrage, and it prescribes what bodily penalty he shall suffer, or what fine he shall pay. Read the law.
“Law
[If any Athenian shall outrage a free-born child, the parent or guardian of the child shall demand a specific penalty. If the court condemn the accused to death, he shall be delivered to the constables and be put to death the same day. If he be condemned to pay a fine, and be unable to pay the fine immediately, he must pay within eleven days after the trial, and he shall remain in prison until payment is made. The same action shall hold against those who abuse the persons of slaves.]”
Now perhaps some one, on first hearing this law, may wonder for what possible reason this word “slaves” was added in the law against outrage. But if you reflect on the matter, fellow citizens, you will find this to be the best provision of all. For it was not for the slaves that the lawgiver was concerned, but he wished to accustom you to keep a long distance away from the crime of outraging free men, and so he added the prohibition against the outraging even of slaves. In a word, he was convinced that in a democracy that man is unfit for citizenship who outrages any person whatsoever.
And I beg you, fellow citizens, to remember this also, that here the lawgiver is not yet addressing the person of the boy himself, but those who are near him, father, brother, guardian, teachers, and in general those who have control of him. But, as soon as the young man has been registered in the list of citizens, and knows the laws of the state, and is now able to distinguish between right and wrong, the lawgiver no longer addresses another, Timarchus, but now the man himself.
And what does he say? “If any Athenian,” he says, “shall have prostituted his person, he shall not be permitted to become one of the nine archons,” because, no doubt, that official wears the wreath;6“nor to discharge the office of priest,” as being not even clean of body; “nor shall he act as an advocate for the state,” he says, “nor shall ever hold any office whatsoever, at home or abroad,whether filled by lot or by election; nor shall he be a herald or an ambassador”
—nor shall he prosecute men who have served as ambassadors, nor shall he be a hired slanderer— “nor ever address senate or assembly,” not even though he be the most eloquent orator in Athens. And if any one contrary to these prohibitions, the lawgiver has provided for criminal process on the charge of prostitution, and has prescribed the heaviest penalties therefor. Read to the jury this law also, that you may know, gentlemen, in the face of what established laws of yours, so good and so moral, Timarchus has had the effrontery to speak before the people—a man whose character is so notorious.
“Law
[If any Athenian shall have prostituted his person, he shall not be permitted to become one of the nine archons, nor to discharge the office of priest, nor to act as an advocate for the state, nor shall he hold any office whatsoever, at home or abroad, whether filled by lot or by election; he shall not be sent as a herald; he shall not take part in debate, nor be present at public sacrifices; when the citizens are wearing garlands, he shall wear none; and he shall not enter within the limits of the place that has been purified for the assembling of the people. If any man who has been convicted of prostitution act contrary to these prohibitions, he shall be put to death.]”
This law was enacted concerning youths who recklessly sin against their own bodies. The laws relating to boys are those read to you a moment ago; but I am going to cite now laws that have to do with the citizens at large. For when the lawgiver had finished with these laws, he next turned to the question of the proper manner of conducting our deliberations concerning the most important matters, when we are met in public assembly. How does he begin? “Laws,” he says, “concerning orderly conduct.” He began with morality, thinking that that state will be best administered in which orderly conduct is most common. And how does he command the presiding officers to proceed?
After the purifying sacrifice has been carried round7 and the herald has offered the traditional prayers, the presiding officers are commanded to declare to be next in order the discussion of matters pertaining to the national religion, the reception of heralds and ambassadors, and the discussion of secular matters.8 The herald then asks, “Who of those above fifty years of age wishes to address the assembly?” When all these have spoken, he then invites any other Athenian to speak who wishes （provided such privileges belongs to him）.9
Consider, fellow citizens, the wisdom of this regulation. The lawgiver does not forget, I think, that the older men are at their best in the matter of judgment, but that courage is now beginning to fail them as a result of their experience of the vicissitudes of life. So, wishing to accustom those who are the wisest to speak on public affairs, and to make this obligatory upon them, since he cannot call on each one of them by name, he comprehends them all under the designation of the age-group as a whole, invites them to the platform, and urges them to address the people. At the same time he teaches the younger men to respect their elders, to yield precedence to them in every act, and to honor that old age to which we shall all come if our lives are spared.
And so decorous were those public men of old, Pericles, Themistocles, and Aristeides （who was called by a name most unlike that by which Timarchus here is called）, that to speak with the arm outside the cloak, as we all do nowadays as a matter of course, was regarded then as an ill-mannered thing, and they carefully refrained from doing it. And I can point to a piece of evidence which seems to me very weighty and tangible. I am sure you have all sailed over to Salamis, and have seen the statue of Solon there. You can therefore yourselves bear witness that in the statue that is set up in the Salaminian market-place Solon stands with his arm inside his cloak. Now this is a reminiscence, fellow citizens, and an imitation of the posture of Solon, showing his customary bearing as he used to address the people of Athens.10
See now, fellow citizens, how unlike to Timarchus were Solon and those men of old whom I mentioned a moment ago. They were too modest to speak with the arm outside the cloak, but this man not long ago, yes, only the other day, in an assembly of the people threw off his cloak and leaped about like a gymnast, half naked, his body so reduced and befouled through drunkenness and lewdness that right-minded men, at least, covered their eyes, being ashamed for the city, that we should let such men as he be our advisers.
It was with such conduct as this in view that the lawgiver expressly prescribed who were to address the assembly, and who were not to be permitted to speak before the people. He does not exclude from the platform the man whose ancestors have not held a general's office, nor even the man who earns his daily bread by working at a trade; nay, these men he most heartily welcomes, and for this reason he repeats again and again the invitation, “Who wishes to address the assembly?”
Who then are they who in the lawgiver's opinion are not to be permitted to speak? Those who have lived a shameful life; these men he forbids to address the people. Where does he show this? Under the heading “Scrutiny of public men”11 he says, “If any one attempts to speak before the people who beats his father or mother, or fails to support them or to provide a home for them.” Such a man, then, he forbids to speak. And right he is, by Zeus, say I! Why? Because if a man is mean toward those whom he ought to honor as the gods, how, pray, he asks, will such a man treat the members of another household, and how will he treat the whole city? Whom did he, in the second place, forbid to speak?
“Or the man who has failed to perform all the military service demanded of him, or who has thrown away his shield.” And he is right. Why? Man, if you fail to take up arms in behalf of the state, or if you are such a coward that you are unable to defend her, you must not claim the right to advise her, either. Whom does he specify in the third place? “Or the man,” he says, “who has debauched or prostituted himself.” For the man who has made traffic of the shame of his own body, he thought would be ready to sell the common interests of the city also. But whom does he specify in the fourth place?
“Or the man,” he says, “who has squandered his patrimony or other inheritance.” For he believed that the man who has mismanaged his own household will handle the affairs of the city in like manner; and to the lawgiver it did not seem possible that the same man could be a rascal in private life, and in public life a good and useful citizen; and he believed that the public man who comes to the platform ought to come prepared, not merely in words, but, before all else, in life.
And he was of the opinion that the advice of a good and upright man, however simple and even awkward the words in which it is given, is profitable to the hearers; but the words of a shameless man, who has treated his own body with scorn and disgracefully squandered his patrimony—the words of such a man the lawgiver believed could never benefit the hearers, however eloquently they might be spoken.
These men, therefore, he debars from the speaker's platform, these he forbids to address the people. But if any one, in violation of these prohibitions, not only speaks, but is guilty of blackmail and wanton scurrility, and if the city is no longer able to put up with such a man, “Let any citizen who chooses,” he says, “and is competent thereto,12 challenge him to a suit of scrutiny;” and then he commands you13 to render decision on the case in a court of justice. This is the law under authority of which I now appear before you.
Now these regulations of the law have long been in force; but you went further and added a new law, after that charming gymnastic exhibition which Timarchus gave in an assembly of the people14; for you were exceedingly ashamed of the affair. By the new law, for every meeting of the assembly one tribe is to be chosen by lot to have charge of the speaker's platform, and to preside.15 And what did the proposer of the law prescribe? That the members of the tribe should sit as defenders of the laws and of the democracy; for he believed that unless we should summon help from some quarter against men who have lived such a life, we should not be able even to deliberate on matters of supreme importance.
For there is no use in attempting, fellow citizens, to drive such men from the platform by shouting at them, for they have no sense of shame. We must try, rather, to break them of their habits by pains and penalties; for so only can they be made endurable.
The clerk shall therefore read to you the laws that are in force to secure orderly conduct16 on the part of our public men. For the law that introduced the presidency of a tribe17 has been attacked in the courts by Timarchus here, in conspiracy with other men like himself, as being inexpedient, their object being to have license to speak, as well as to behave, as they choose.
“Laws
[If any public man, speaking in the senate or in the assembly of the people, shall not speak on the subject which is before the house, or shall fail to speak on each proposition separately, or shall speak twice on the same subject in one day, or if he shall speak abusively or slanderously, or shall interrupt the proceedings, or in the midst of the deliberations shall get up and speak on anything that is not in order, or shall shout approval, or shall lay hands on the presiding officer, on adjournment of the assembly or the senate the board of presidents are authorized to report his name to the collectors, with a fine of not more than 50 drachmas for each offence. But if he be deserving of heavier penalty, they shall impose a fine of not more than 50 drachmas, and refer the case to the senate or to the next meeting of the assembly. After due summons that body shall pass judgment; the vote shall be secret, and if he be condemned, the presiding officers shall certify the result to the collectors.]”
You have heard the laws, fellow citizens, and I am sure that you approve of them. But whether these laws are to be of use or not, rests with you. For if you punish the wrong-doers, your laws will be good and valid; but if you let them go, the laws will still be good, indeed, but valid no longer.
Now that I have finished with the laws, I wish next, as I proposed at the outset, to inquire into the character of Timarchus, that you may know how completely at variance it is with your laws. And I beg you to pardon me, fellow citizens, if, compelled to speak about habits which by nature are, indeed, unclean, but are nevertheless his, I be led to use some expression that is as bad as Timarchus' deeds.
For it would not be right for you to blame me, if now and again I use plain language in my desire to inform you; the blame should rather be his, if it is a fact that his life has been so shameful that a man who is describing his behavior is unable to say what he wishes without sometimes using expressions that are likewise shameful. But I will try my best to avoid doing this.
See, fellow citizens, with what moderation I am going to deal with Timarchus here. For I remit all the sins that as a boy he committed against his own body; let all this be treated as were the acts committed in the days of the Thirty, or before the year of Eucleides,18 or whenever else a similar statute of limitations has been passed. But what he is guilty of having done after he had reached years of discretion, when he was already a youth, and knew the laws of the state, that I will make the object of my accusation, and to that I call uponyou to give serious attention.
First of all, as soon as he was past boyhood he settled down in the Peiraeus at the establishment of Euthydicus the physician, pretending to be a student of medicine, but in fact deliberately offering himself for sale, as the event proved. The names of the merchants or other foreigners, or of our own citizens, who enjoyed the person of Timarchus in those days I will pass over willingly, that no one may say that I am over particular to state every petty detail. But in whose houses he has lived to the shame of his own body and of the city, earning wages by precisely that thing which the law forbids, under penalty of losing the privilege of public speech, of this I will speak.
Fellow citizens, there is one Misgolas, son of Naucrates, of the deme Collytus, a man otherwise honorable, and beyond reproach save in this, that he is bent on that sort of thing like one possessed, and is accustomed always to have about him singers or cithara-players. I say this, not from any liking for indecent talk, but that you may know what sort of man Misgolas is. Now this Misgolas, perceiving Timarchus' motive in staying at the house of the physician, paid him a sum of money in advance and caused him to change his lodgings, and got him into his own home; for Timarchus was well developed, young, and lewd, just the person for the thing that Misgolas wanted to do, and Timarchus wanted to have done.
Timarchus did not hesitate, but submitted to it all, though he had income to satisfy all reasonable desires. For his father had left him a very large property, which he has squandered, as I will show in the course of my speech. But he behaved as he did because he was a slave to the most shameful lusts, to gluttony and extravagance at table, to flute-girls and harlots, to dice, and to all those other things no one of which ought to have the mastery over a man who is well-born and free. And this wretch was not ashamed to abandon his father's house and live with Misgolas, a man who was not a friend of his father's, nor a person of his own age, but a stranger, and older than himself, a man who knew no restraint in such matters, while Timarchus himself was in the bloom of youth.
Among the many ridiculous things which Timarchus did in those days was one which I wish to relate to you. The occasion was the procession at the City Dionysia. Misgolas, who had taken possession of him, and Phaedrus, son of Callias, of the deme Sphettus, were to march in the procession together. Now Timarchus here had agreed to join them in the procession, but they were busy with their general preparations, and he failed to come back. Misgolas, provoked at the thing, proceeded to make search for him in company with Phaedrus. They got word of him and found him at lunch with some foreigners in a lodging-house. Misgolas and Phaedrus threatened the foreigners and ordered them to follow straight to the lock-up for having corrupted a free youth. The foreigners were so scared that they dropped everything and ran away as fast as they could go.
The truth of this story is known to everybody who knew Misgolas and Timarchus in those days. Indeed, I am very glad that the suit that I am prosecuting is against a man not unknown to you, and known for no other thing than precisely that practice as to which you are going to render your verdict. For in the case of facts which are not generally known, the accuser is bound, I suppose, to make his proofs explicit; but where the facts are notorious, I think it is no very difficult matter to conduct the prosecution, for one has only to appeal to the recollection of his hearers.
owever, although the fact in this case is acknowledged, I remember that we are in court, and so I have drafted an affidavit for Misgolas, true and not indelicate in phrasing, as I flatter myself. For I do not set down the actual name of the thing that Misgolas used to do to him, nor have I written anything else that would legally incriminate a man who has testified to the truth.19 But I have set down what will be no news for you to hear, and will involve the witness in no danger nor disgrace.
If therefore Misgolas is willing to come forward here and testify to the truth, he will be doing what is right; but if he prefers to refuse the summons rather than testify to the truth, the whole business will be made clear to you. For if the man who did the thing is going to be ashamed of it and choose to pay a thousand drachmas into the treasury rather than show his face before you,20 while the man to whom it has been done is to be a speaker in your assembly, then wise indeed was the lawgiver who excluded such disgusting creatures from the platform.
But if Misgolas does indeed answer the summons, but resorts to the most shameless course, denial of the truth under oath, as a grateful return to Timarchus, and a demonstration to the rest of them that he well knows how to help cover up such conduct, in the first place he will damage himself, and in the second place he will gain nothing by it. For I have prepared another affidavit for those who know that this man Timarchus left his father's house and lived with Misgolas, though it is a difficult thing, no doubt, that I am undertaking. For I have to present as my witnesses, not friends of mine nor enemies of theirs, nor those who are strangers to both of us, but their friends.
But even if they do persuade these men also not to testify—I do not expect they will, at any rate not all of them—one thing at least they will never succeed in accomplishing: they will never hush up the truth, nor blot out Timarchus' reputation among his fellow citizens—a reputation which he owes to no act of mine, but to his own conduct. For the life of a virtuous man ought to be so clean that it will not admit even of a suspicion of wrong-doing.
But I wish to say another thing in anticipation, in case Misgolas shall answer before the laws and before you. There are men who by nature differ widely from the rest of us as to their apparent age. For some men, young in years, seem mature and older than they are; others, old by count of years, seem to be mere youths. Misgolas is such a man. He happens, indeed, to be of my own age, and was in the cadet corps with me;21 we are now in our forty-fifth year. I am quite gray, as you see, but not he. Why do I speak of this? Because I fear that,seeing him for the first time, you may be surprised,and some such thought as this may occur to you: “Heracles! This man is not much older than Timarchus.” For not only is this youthful appearance characteristic of the man, but moreover Timarchus was already past boyhood when he used to be in his company.
But not to delay, call first, if you please, those who know that Timarchus here lived in the house of Misgolas, then read the testimony of Phaedrus, and, finally, please take the affidavit of Misgolas himself, in case fear of the gods, and respect for those who know the facts as well as he does, and for the citizens at large and for you the jurors, shall persuade him to testify to the truth.“Testimony
[Misgolas, son of Nicias, of Piraeus, testifies. Timarchus, who once used to stay at the house of Euthydicis the physician, became intimate with me, and I hold him today in the same esteem as in all my past acquaintance with him.]”
Now, fellow citizens, if Timarchus here had remained with Misgolas and never gone to another man's house, his conduct would have been more decent—if really any such conduct is “decent”—and I should not have ventured to bring any other charge against him than that which the lawgiver describes in plain words, simply that he was a kept man. For the man who practises this thing with one person, and practises it for pay, seems to me to be liable to precisely this charge.
But if, saying nothing about these bestial fellows, Cedonides, Autocleides, and Thersandrus, and simply telling the names of those in whose houses he has been an inmate, I refresh your memories and show that he is guilty of selling his person not only in Misgolas' house, but in the house of another man also, and again of another, and that from this last he went to still another, surely you will no longer look upon him as one who has merely been a kept man, but—by Dionysus, I don't know how I can keep glossing the thing over all day long—as a common prostitute. For the man who follows these practices recklessly and with many men and for pay seems to me to be chargeable with precisely this.
Well, when now Misgolas found him too expensive and dismissed him, next Anticles, son of Callias, the deme Euonymon, took him up. Anticles, however, is absent in Samos as a member of the new colony, so I will pass on to the next incident. For after this man Timarchus had left Anticles and Misgolas, he did not repent or reform his way of life, but spent his days in the gambling-place, where the gaming-table is set, and cock-fighting and dice-throwing are the regular occupations. I imagine some of you have seen the place; at any rate you have heard of it.
Among the men who spend their time there is one Pittalacus, a slave-fellow who is the property of the city. He had plenty of money, and seeing Timarchus spending his time thus he took him and kept him in his own house. This foul wretch here was not disturbed by the fact that he was going to defile himself with a public slave, but thought of one thing only, of getting him to be paymaster for his own disgusting lusts; to the question of virtue or of shame he never gave a thought.
Now the sins of this Pittalacus against the person of Timarchus, and his abuse of him, as they have come to my ears, are such that, by the Olympian Zeus, I should not dare to repeat them to you. For the things that he was not ashamed to do in deed, I had rather die than describe to you in words. But about the same time, while, as I have said, he was staying with Pittalacus, here comes Hegesandrus, back again from the Hellespont. I know you are surprised that I have not mentioned him long before this, so notorious is what I am going to relate.
This Hegesandrus, whom you know better than I, arrives. It happened that he had at that time sailed to the Hellespont as treasurer to the general Timomachus, of the deme Acharnae; and he returned, having made the most, it is said, of the simple-mindedness of the general, for he had in his possession no less than eighty minas of silver. Indeed, he proved to be, in a way, largely responsible for the fate of Timomachus.22
Hegesandrus, being so well supplied with money, resorted to the house of Pittalacus, who gambled with him; there he first saw this man Timarchus; he was pleased with him, lusted after him, and wanted to take him to his own house, thinking, doubtless, that here was a man of his own kidney. So he first had a talk with Pittalacus, asking him to turn Timarchus over to him. Failing to persuade him, he appealed to the man himself. He did not spend many words; the man was instantly persuaded. For when it is a question of the business itself, Timarchus shows an openmindedness and a spirit of accommodation that are truly wonderful; indeed, that is one of the very reasons why he ought to be an object of loathing.
When now he had left Pittalacus' house and been taken up by Hegesandrus, Pittalacus was enraged, I fancy, at having wasted, as he considered it, so much money, and, jealous at what was going on, he kept visiting the house. When he was getting to be a nuisance, behold, a mighty stroke on the part of Hegesandrus and Timarchus! One night when they were drunk they, with certain others, whose names I do not care to mention,
burst into the house where Pittalacus was living. First they smashed the implements of his trade and tossed them into the street—sundry dice23 and dice-boxes, and his gaming utensils in general; they killed the quails and cocks, so well beloved by the miserable man; and finally they tied Pittalacus himself to the pillar and gave him an inhuman whipping, which lasted until even the neighbors heard the uproar.
The next day Pittalacus, exceeding angry over the affair, comes without his cloak to the marketplace and seats himself at the altar of the Mother of the Gods. And when, as always happens, a crowd of people had come running up, Hegesandrus and Timarchus, afraid that their disgusting vices were going to be published to the whole town—a meeting of the assembly was about to be held—hurried up to the altar themselves, and some of their gaming-companions with them,
and surrounding Pittalacus begged him to get up, saying that the whole thing was only a drunken frolic; and this man himself, not yet, by Zeus, repulsive to the sight as he is now, but still usable, begged, touching the fellow's chin, and saying he would do anything Pittalacus pleased. At last they persuaded him to get up from the altar, believing that he was going to receive some measure of justice. But as soon as he had left the marketplace, they paid no more attention to him.
the fellow, angry at their insolent treatment, brings a suit against each of them.24
When now the case was coming to trial, behold, another mighty stroke on the part of Hegesandrus! Here was a man who had done him no wrong, but, quite the opposite, had been wronged by him, a man on whom he had no claim, in fact, a slave belonging to the city; this man he attempted to enslave to himself, alleging that he was his owner. Now Pittalacus, reduced to desperate straits, falls in with a man—a very good man he is—one Glaucon of the deme Cholargus; he attempts to rescue Pittalacus and secure his freedom.
law-suits were next begun.25 As time went on they submitted the matter to the arbitration of Diopeithes of Sunium, a man of Hegesandrus' own deme and one with whom he had had dealings in his younger years. Diopeithes undertook the case, but put it off again and again in order to favor these parties.
But when now Hegesandrus was coming before you as a public speaker, being at the same time engaged in his attack on Aristophon of Azenia, an attack which he kept up until Aristophon threatened to institute against him before the people the same process that I have instituted against Timarchus, and when Hegesandrus' brother Crobylus26 was coming forward as a public man, when, in short, these men had the effrontery to advise you as to international questions, then at last Pittalacus, losing confidence in himself and asking himself who he was that he should attempt to fight against such men as these, came to a wise decision—for I must speak the truth: he gave up, and considered himself lucky if his ill-treatment should stop there.
So now when Hegesandrus had won this glorious victory—without a fight!—he kept possession of the defendant, Timarchus.
That this is true you all know. For who of you that has ever gone to the stalls where dainty foods are sold has not observed the lavish expenditures of these men? Or who that has happened to encounter their revels and brawls has not been indignant in behalf of the city? However, since we are in court, call, if you please, Glaucon of Cholargus, who restored Pittalacus to freedom,27 and read his affidavit and the others.
“Affidavits
[Glaucon, son of Timaeus, of Cholargus, testifies. I rescued Pittalacus and secured his freedom, when Hegesandrus was attempting to make him his slave. Some time after this, Pittalacus came to me and said that he wished to send to Hegesandrus and come to such settlement with him that the suits should be dropped, both his own suit against Hegesandrus and Timarchus, and the suit of Hegesandrus for his enslavement. And they came to a settlement.
Amphisthenes testifies to the same effect. “I rescued Pittalacus and secured his freedom, when Hegesandrus was attempting to make him his slave,” and so forth.]”
Now I will summon Hegesandrus himself for you. I have written out for him an affidavit that is too respectable for a man of his character, but a little more explicit than the one I wrote for Misgolas. I am perfectly aware that he will refuse to swear to it, and presently will perjure himself. Why then do I call him to testify? That I may demonstrate to you what sort of man this kind of life produces—how regardless of the gods, how contemptuous of the laws, how indifferent to all disgrace. Please call Hegesandrus.28
“Affidavit
[Hegesandrus, son of Diphilus, of Steiria testifies. When I returned from my voyage to the Hellespont, I found Timarchus, son of Arizelus, staying at the house of Pittalacus, the gambler. As a result of this acquaintance I enjoyed the same intimacy with Timarchus as with Leodamas previously.]”
I was sure, fellow citizens, that Hegesandrus would disdain the oath, and I told you so in advance. This too is plain at once, that since he is not willing to testify now, he will presently appear for the defence. And no wonder, by Zeus! For he will come up here to the witness stand, I suppose, trusting in his record, honorable and upright man that he is, an enemy of all evil-doing, a man who does not know who Leodamas was—Leodamas, at whose name you yourselves raised a shout as the affidavit was being read.
Shall I yield to the temptation to use language somewhat more explicit than my own self-respect allows? Tell me, fellow citizens, in the name of Zeus and the other gods, when a man has defiled himself with Hegesandrus, does not that man seem to you to have prostituted himself to a prostitute? In what excesses of bestiality are we not to imagine them to have indulged when they were drunken and alone! Don't you suppose that Hegesandrus, in his desire to wipe out his own notorious practices with Leodamas, which are known to all of you, made extravagant demands on the defendant, hoping to make Timarchus' conduct so exceedingly bad that his own earlier behavior would seem to have been modest indeed?
And yet you will presently see Hegesandrus and his brother Crobylus leaping to the platform here and most vehemently and eloquently declaring that what I say is all nonsense. They will demand that I present witnesses to testify explicitly where he did it, how he did it, or who saw him do it, or what sort of an act it was—a shameless demand, I think.
For I do not believe your memory is so short that you have forgotten the laws that you heard read a few moments ago, in which it stands written that if anyone hires any Athenian for this act, or if any one lets himself out for hire, he is liable to the most severe penalties, and the same penalties for both offences. Now what man is so reckless that he would be willing to give in plain words testimony which, if the testimony be true, would inevitably amount to information against himself as liable to extreme punishment?
Only one alternative then remains: that the man who submitted to the act shall acknowledge it. But he is on trial on precisely this charge, that after such conduct as this, he breaks the laws by speaking before the assembly. Shall we, then, drop the whole affair,and make no further inquiry? By Poseidon, a fine home this city will be for us, if when we ourselves know that a thing has been done in fact, we are to ignore it unless some man come forward here and testify to the act in words as explicit as they must be shameless.
But pray consider the case with the help of illustrations; and naturally the illustrations will have to be like the pursuits of Timarchus. You see the men over yonder who sit in the bawdy-houses, men who confessedly pursue the profession. Yet these persons, brought to such straits as that, do nevertheless make some attempt to cover their shame: they shut their doors. Now if, as you are passing along the street, any one should ask you, “Pray, what is the fellow doing at this moment?” you would instantly name the act, though you do not see it done, and do not know who it was that entered the house; knowing the profession of the man, you know his act also.
In the same way, therefore, you ought to judge the case of Timarchus, and not to ask whether anyone saw, but whether he has done the deed. For by heaven, Timarchus, what shall a man say? What would you say yourself about another man on trial on this charge? What shall we say when a young man leaves his father's house and spends his nights in other people's houses, a conspicuously handsome young man? When he enjoys costly suppers without paying for them, and keeps the most expensive flutegirls and harlots? When he gambles and pays nothing himself but another man always pays for him?
Does it take a wizard to explain all that? Is it not perfectly plain that the man who makes such demands must himself necessarily be furnishing in return certain pleasures to the men who are spending their money on him? I say “furnishing pleasures,” because, by the Olympian Zeus, I don't know how I can use more euphemistic language than that in referring to your contemptible conduct.
But also look at the case, if you please, with the help of certain illustrations taken from the field of politics, especially matters which you have in hand just now. We have been having revisions of the citizen-lists in the demes, and each one of us has submitted to a vote regarding himself to determine whether he is a genuine citizen or not. Now whenever I am in the court-room listening to the pleas,29 I see that the same argument always prevails with you: when the prosecutor says
“Gentlemen of the jury, the men of the deme have under oath excluded this man on their own personal knowledge, although nobody brought accusation or gave testimony against him,” you immediately applaud, assuming that the man who is before the court has no claim to citizenship. For I suppose you are of the opinion that when one knows a thing perfectly of his own knowledge, he does not need argument or testimony in addition.
Come now, in God's name! if, as on the question of birth, so on the question of these personal habits, Timarchus had to submit to a vote as to whether he is guilty of the charge or not, and the case were being tried in court and were being brought before you as now, except that it were not permitted by constitution or statute either for me to accuse or for him to defend himself, and if this crier who is now standing at my side were putting the question to you in the formula prescribed by law, “The hollow ballot for the juror who believes that Timarchus has been a prostitute, the solid ballot for the juror who does not,”30 what would be your vote? I am absolutely sure that you would decide against him.
Now if one of you should ask me, “How do you know that we would vote against him?” I should answer, “Because you have spoken out and told me.” And I will remind you when and where each man of you speaks and tells me: it is every time that Timarchus mounts the platform in the assembly; and the senate spoke out, when last year he was a member of the senate. For every time he used such words as “walls” or “tower” that needed repairing, or told how so-and-so had been “taken off” somewhere, you immediately laughed and shouted, and yourselves spoke the words that belong to those exploits of which he, to your knowledge, is guilty.31
will pass over the most of these incidents and those which happened long ago, but I do wish to remind you of what took place at the very assembly in which I instituted this process against Timarchus.32
The Senate of the Areopagus appeared before the people in accordance with the resolution that Timarchus had introduced in the matter of the dwelling-houses on the Pnyx. The member of the Areopagus who spoke was Autolycus, a man whose life has been good and pious, by Zeus and Apollo, and worthy of that body.
Now when in the course of his speech he declared that the Areopagus disapproved the proposition of Timarchus, and said, “You must not be surprised, fellow citizens, if Timarchus is better acquainted than the Senate of the Areopagus with this lonely spot and the region of the Pnyx,” then you applauded and said Autolycus was right, for Timarchus was indeed acquainted with it.33
Autolycus, however, did not catch the point of your uproar; he frowned and stopped a moment; then he went on: “But, fellow citizens, we members of the Areopagus neither accuse nor defend, for such is not our tradition, but we do make some such allowance as this for Timarchus: he perhaps,” said he, “thought that where everything is so quiet, there will be but little expense for each of you.” Again, at the words “quiet” and “little expense,” he encountered still greater laughter and shouting from you.34
and when he spoke of the “house sites” and the “tanks” you simply couldn't restrain yourselves.35 Thereupon Pyrrandrus came forward to censure you, and he asked the people if they were not ashamed of themselves for laughing in the presence of the Senate of the Areopagus. But you drove him off the platform, replying, “We know, Pyrrandrus, that we ought not to laugh in their presence, but so strong is the truth that it prevails—over all the calculations of men.”
This, then, I understand to be the testimony that has been offered you by the people of Athens, and it would not be proper that they should be convicted of giving false testimony. When I, fellow citizens, say not a word, you of yourselves shout the name of the acts of which you know he is guilty; strange, then, it would be if when I name them, you cannot remember them; even had there been no trial of this case, he would have been convicted; strange indeed then if when the charge has been proved, he is to be acquitted!
But since I have mentioned the revision of the lists and the measures proposed by Demophilus,36 I wish to cite a certain other illustration in this connection. For this Demophilus had previously brought in a measure of the following sort: he declared that there were certain men who were attempting to bribe the members of the popular assembly and the courts as well—the same assertion that Nicostratus also has made very recently. Some cases under this charge have been in the courts, others are still pending.
Come now, in the name of Zeus and the gods, if they had resorted to the same defence that Timarchus and his advocates now offer, and demanded that someone should testify explicitly to the crime, or else that the jurors should refuse to believe the charge, surely according to that demand it would have been absolutely necessary for the one man to testify that he gave a bribe, the other, that he took a bribe, though the law threatens each of them with death precisely as in this case if anyone hires an Athenian for a disgraceful purpose, and again if any Athenian voluntarily hires himself out to the shame of his body.
Is there any man who would have testified, or any prosecutor who would have undertaken to present such proof of the act? Surely not. What then? Were the accused acquitted? No, by Heracles! They were punished with death, though their crime was far less, by Zeus and Apollo, than that of this defendant; those poor wretches met such a fate because they were unable to defend themselves against old age and poverty together, the greatest of human misfortunes; the defendant should suffer it because he is unwilling to restrain his own lewdness.
Now if this trial were taking place in another city, and that city were the referee, I should have demanded that you should be my witnesses, you who best know that I am speaking the truth. But since the trial is at Athens, and you are at the same time judges and witnesses of the truth of what I say, it is my place to refresh your memory, and yours not to disbelieve me. For I think Timarchus' anxiety is not for himself alone, fellow citizens, but for all the others also whose practices have been the same as his.
For if in the future, as always in the past, this practice is going to be carried on in secret, and in lonely places and in private houses, and if the man who best knows the facts, but has defiled one of his fellow citizens, is to be liable to the severest punishment if he testifies to the truth, while the man on trial, who has been denounced by the testimony of his own life and of the truth, is to demand that he be judged, not by the facts that are notorious, but by the testimony of witnesses, then the law is done away with, and so is the truth, while a plain path is marked out by which the worst wrongdoers may escape.
For what foot-pad or adulterer or assassin, or what man who has committed the greatest crimes, but has done it secretly, will be brought to justice? For whereas such of these criminals as are caught in the act are instantly punished with death, if they acknowledge the crime, those who have done the act secretly and deny their guilt, are tried in the courts, and the truth can be determined by circumstantial evidence only.
Take the example of the Senate of the Areopagus, the most scrupulous tribunal in the city. I myself have before now seen many men convicted before this tribunal, though they spoke most eloquently, and presented witnesses; and I know that before now certain men have won their case, although they spoke most feebly, and although no witnesses testified for them. For it is not on the strength of the pleading alone, nor of the testimony alone, that the members of the court give their verdict, but on the strength of their own knowledge and their own investigations. And this is the reason why that tribunal maintains its high repute in the city.
Therefore, my fellow citizens, I call upon you to make your decision in this case in the same manner. In the first place, let nothing be more credible in your eyes than your own knowledge and conviction regarding this man Timarchus. In the second place, look at the case in the light, not of the present moment, but of the time that is past. For the words spoken before today about Timarchus and his practices were spoken because they were true; but what will be said today will be spoken because of the trial,and with intent to deceive you. Give, therefore, the verdict that is demanded by the longer time, and the truth, and your own knowledge.
And yet a certain speech-writer who is concocting his defense37 says that I contradict myself; since it seems to him impossible, he says, for the same man to have been a prostitute and to have consumed his patrimony. For, he says, to have sinned against one's own body is the act of a boy, but to have consumed one's patrimony is that of a man. And furthermore he says that those who defile themselves exact pay for it. He therefore goes up and down the marketplace expressing his wonder and amazement that one and the same man should have prostituted himself and also have consumed his patrimony.
Now if anyone does not understand the facts of the case, I will try to explain them more clearly. Hegesandrus, who kept Timarchus, had married an heiress. So long as her inheritance held out, and the money that Hegesandrus had brought back with him from his voyage with Timomachus, they lived in all luxury and lewdness. But when these resources had been wasted and gambled away and eaten up, and this defendant had lost his youthful charm, and, as you would expect, no one would any longer give him anything, while his lewd and depraved nature constantly craved the same indulgences, and with excessive incontinence kept making demand after demand upon him,
then, at last, incessantly drawn back to his old habits, he resorted to the devouring of his patrimony. And not only did he eat it up, but, if one may so say, he also drank it up! He sold one piece of property after another, not for what it was worth—he couldn't wait for a higher offer nor even for the bare value, but let it go for what it would fetch on the instant, so urgently did he hasten to gratify his lusts.
His father left him a fortune which another man would have found sufficient for the service of the state also.38 But Timarchus was not able even to preserve it for himself. There was a house south of the Acropolis, a suburban estate at Sphettus, another piece of land at Alopeke, and besides there were nine or ten slaves who were skilled shoemakers, each of whom paid him a fee of two obols a day, and the superintendent of the shop three obols.39 Besides these there was a woman skilled in flax-working, who produced fine goods for the market, and there was a man skilled in embroidery. Certain men also owed him money, and there were house furnishings.
Here, at any rate, by Zeus, I will present my witnesses to prove the truth of what I say, and they will testify most clearly and explicitly; for there is no danger, as there was the other time, to the man who testifies to the truth, nor any disgrace either. The city residence he sold to Nausicrates, the comic poet;40 afterward Cleaenetus, the chorus-master, bought it of Nausicrates for twenty minas. The suburban estate Mnesitheus of Myrrinoussa bought of him, a large tract, but wretchedly run down by his neglect.
the place at Alopeke, distant eleven or twelve furlongs from the city-wall, his mother begged and besought him, as I have heard, to spare and not to sell, or, if he would do nothing more, at least to leave her there a place to be buried in. But even from this spot he did not withhold his hand; this too he sold, for 2,000 drachmas. Of the slaves, men and women, he left not one; he has sold them all. To prove that I am not lying, I will produce witness that his father left the slaves; but if he denies that he has sold them, let him produce their persons in court.
but to prove, further, that his father had lent money to certain men, and that Timarchus collected and has spent it, I will call as witnesses for you Metagenes of Sphettus, who owed more than thirty minas, and paid to the defendant what was still due at his father's death, seven minas. Please call Metagenes of Sphettus. But first of all read the testimony of Nausicrates, who bought the house, and take all the other depositions that I mentioned in the same connection.“Depositions”
I will now show you that his father had not a little ready money, which the defendant has squandered. For the father, afraid of the special services to which he would be liable,41 sold the property that he owned （with the exception of the items I have mentioned）—a piece of land in Cephisia, another in Amphitrope, and two workshops at the silver mines, one of them in Aulon, the other near the tomb of Thrasyllus.
How it was that the father became so well-to-do I will tell you. There were three brothers in this family, Eupolemus, the gymnastic trainer, Arizelus,the father of the defendant, and Arignotus, who is still living, an old man now, and blind. Of these, Eupolemus was the first to die, before the estate had been divided; next, Arizelus, the father of Timarchus. So long as Arizelus lived, he managed the whole estate, because of the ill-health of Arignotus and the trouble with his eyes, and because Eupolemus was dead. By agreement with Arignotus he regularly gave him a sum of money for his support.
then Arizelus, the father of the defendant Timarchus, died also. In the first years thereafter, so long as the defendant was a child, Arignotus received from the guardians42 all that one could ask. But after Timarchus was enrolled in the citizens' list, and had come into control of the estate, he thrust aside this old and unfortunate man, his own uncle, and made way with the estate. He gave nothing to Arignotus for his support, but was content to see him, fallen from such wealth, now receiving the alms that the city gives to disabled paupers.43
finally—and most shameful of all—when the old man's name had been omitted at a revision of the list of pauper-pensioners, and he had laid a petition before the senate to have his dole restored, the defendant, who was a member of the senate, and one of the presiding officers that day, did not deign to speak for him, but let him lose his monthly pension.44 To prove the truth of what I say, call,if you please, Arignotus of Sphettus, and read his affidavit.“Affidavit”
But perhaps someone may say that after selling his father's house he bought another one somewhere else in the city, and that in place of the suburban estate and the land at Alopeke, and the slaves and the rest, he made investments in connection with the silver mines, as his father had done before him. No, he has nothing left, not a house, not an apartment, not a piece of ground, no slaves, no money at interest, nor anything else from which honest men get a living. On the contrary, in place of his patrimony, the resources he has left are lewdness, calumny, impudence, wantonness, cowardice, effrontery, a face that knows not the blush of shame—all that would produce the lowest and most unprofitable citizen.
But it is not only his patrimony that he has wasted, but also the common possessions of the state, your possessions, so far as they have ever come under his control. You see for yourselves how young he is, and yet there is not a public office which he has not held, not one of them by lot or by election, but every one by purchase, in defiance of the laws. The most of them I will pass over, and mention two or three only.
He held the office of auditor, and did the state serious injury by taking bribes from office holders who had been dishonest,45 though his specialty was the blackmailing of innocent men who were to appear before the auditing board. He held a magistracy in Andros, which he bought for thirty minas, borrowing the money at nine obols on the mina,46 and thus he made your allies a ready source of supply for his own lusts. And in his treatment of the wives of free men he showed such licentiousness as no other man ever did. Of these men I call no one into court to testify publicly to his own misfortune, which he has chosen to cover in silence, but I leave it to you to investigate this matter.
But what do you expect? If a man at Athens not only abuses other people, but even his own body, here where there are laws, where you are looking on, where his personal enemies are on the watch, who would expect that same man, when he had received impunity and authority and office, to have placed any limit on his license? By Zeus and Apollo, many a time before now have I marvelled at the good fortune of your city, shown on many other occasions, but not least in this, that in those days he found nobody to whom he could sell the state of Andros!
But, you say, although he was worthless when he held office alone, yet when he was associated with others he was all right! How so? This man, fellow citizens, became a member of the senate in the archsonship of Nicophemus.47 Now to recount all the rascalities of which he was guilty in that year would be too large an undertaking for the small fraction of a day; but those which are most germane to the charge that underlies the present trial, I will relate in a few words.
in the same year in which Timarchus was a member of the senate, Hegesandrus, the brother of Crobylus, was a treasurer of the funds of the goddess,48 and together, in right friendly comradeship, they were in the act of stealing a thousand drachmas which belonged to the city. But a reputable man, Pamphilus of the deme Acherdous, who had had some trouble with the defendant and was angry with him, found out what was going on, and at a meeting of the assembly arose and said, “Fellow citizens, a man and a woman are conspiring to steal one thousand drachmas of yours.”
then you in astonishment cried, “How ‘a man and a woman,’ what are you talking about?” after a little he went on: “Don't you understand,” said he, “what I mean? The man is our friend Hegesandrus there, a man now, though he too used to be a woman, Laodamas's woman; as for the woman, she is Timarchus yonder. How the money is being stolen I will tell you.” He then proceeded to give a full account of the matter, and in a way that showed that there was no guesswork about it. After he had given you this information, “What is it, fellow citizens,” said he, “that I advise? If the senate sustains the charge against this man and expels him, and then hands him over to the courts, give the senate the usual testimonial;49 but if they fail to punish him, refuse to give it, and lay up this thing against them for that day.”
after this, when the senate had returned to the senate chamber,50 they expelled him on the preliminary ballot, but took him back on the final vote.51 I must tell you, however unpleasant it is to mention it, that for their failure to hand him over to the courts, or even to expel him from the senate chamber, they failed to receive the usual testimonial. I beg you therefore, fellow citizens, not to present the spectacle of showing resentment toward the senate, and depriving five hundred citizens of a crown because they failed to punish the defendant, and then letting him go free yourselves; and I beg you not to preserve for the popular assembly a public man who has proved useless to the senate.
But, you say, though such is his record in the offices filled by lot, he has been a better man in the elective offices.52 Why, who of you has not heard of his notorious conviction for stealing? You will recall that you sent him as an inspector of the mercenary troops in Eretria.53 He and he only of the board of inspectors acknowledged that he had taken money, and made no defence against the charge, but immediately admitted his guilt, making his plea only as to the penalty. You punished those who denied their guilt with a fine of a talent apiece, but him with half a talent. Whereas the laws command that thieves who admit their guilt shall be punished with death; it is those who deny their guilt that are to be put on trial.
In consequence of this experience so great became his contempt for you that immediately, on the occasion of the revision of the citizen lists, he gathered in two thousand drachmas. For he asserted that Philotades of Cydathenaeon, a citizen, was a former slave of his own, and he persuaded the members of the deme to disfranchise him. He took charge of the prosecution in court,54 and after he had taken the sacred offerings in his hand and sworn that he had not taken a bribe and would not,
and though he swore by the usual gods of oaths55 and called down destruction on his own head, yet it has been proved that he received twenty minas from Leuconides, the brother-in-law of Philotades, at the hands of Philemon the actor, which money he soon spent on his mistress Philoxene. And so he broke his oath and abandoned the case. To prove that I speak the truth please call Philemon, who paid over the money, and Leuconides, the brother-in-law of Philotades, and read the copy of the agreement by which he effected the sale of the case.“Affidavits”“Agreement”
Now what manner of man he has shown himself to be in his dealings with his fellow citizens and his own family, how shamefully he has wasted his patrimony, how he has submitted to the abuse of his own body, all this you knew as well as I, before ever I spoke, but my account of it has sufficiently refreshed your memory. Two points of my plea remain, and I pray to all the gods and goddesses that I may be enabled to speak regarding them as I have planned to do, for the public good; and I should like you to give attention to what I am about to say, and to follow me with willing mind.
The first of these points is an anticipation of the defence which I hear he is about to offer, for I fear that if I neglect this topic, that man who professes to teach the young the tricks of speech56 may mislead you by some artifice, and so defraud the state. My second point is an exhortation of the citizens to virtue. And I see many young men present in court, and many of their elders, and not a few citizens of other states of Hellas, gathered here to listen. Do not imagine that they have come to look at me.
Nay, rather have they come to find out about you, whether you not only know how to make good laws, but also are able to distinguish between good conduct and bad; whether you know how to honor good men; and whether you are willing to punish those who make their own life a reproach to the city. I will first speak to you about the defence.
The eminent orator Demosthenes says that you must either wipe out your laws, or else no attention must be paid to my words. For he is amazed, he says, if you do not all remember that every single year the senate farms out the tax on prostitutes, and that the men who buy this tax do not guess, but know precisely, who they are that follow this profession. When, therefore, I have dared to bring impeachment against Timarchus for having prostituted himself, in order that I may deprive him of the right to address the people in assembly, Demosthenes says that the very act complained of calls, not for an accuser's arraignment, but for the testimony of the tax-gatherer who collected this tax from Timarchus.
Now, fellow citizens, see whether the reply that I make seems to you frank and straightforward. For I am ashamed in the city's behalf, if Timarchus,the counsellor of the people, the man who dares to go out into Hellas on their embassies, if this man, instead of undertaking to clear his record of the whole matter, shall ask us to specify the localities where he plied his trade, and to say whether the tax collectors have ever collected the prostitutes' licence from him.
For your sakes pray let him give up such defence as that! But I myself will suggest to you, Timarchus, a different line of defence, which is honorable and fair, and you will adopt it, if you are conscious of having done nothing shameful. Come, dare to look the jury in the face and say that which a decent man ought to say of his youth: “Fellow citizens, I have been brought up as boy and youth among you; how I have spent my time is no secret to you, and you see me with you in your assemblies.
Now if I were defending myself before any other set of men on the charge on which I stand accused, I think your testimony would readily suffice to refute the words of my accuser. For if any such act has been committed by me, nay rather if my life has exhibited to you even any resemblance to that of which he accuses me, I feel that the rest of my life is not worth living; I freely concede you my punishment, that the state may have therein a defence in the eyes of Hellas. I have not come here to beg for mercy from you; nay, do with me what you will, if you believe that I am such a man as that.”
This, Timarchus, is the defence of a good and decent man, a man who has confidence in his past life, and who with good reason looks with contempt upon all efforts to slander him.
But the defence which Demosthenes persuades you to make is not for a free man, but for a prostitute—quibbling about when and where! But since you do take refuge in the names of the lodgings, demanding that in our proof we specify every single house where you plied your trade, to such an argument as that you will never again resort, if you are wise, when you have heard what I am about to say. For it is not the lodgings and the houses which give their names to the men who have lived in them, but it is the tenants who give to the places the names of their own pursuits.
Where, for example, several men hire one house and occupy it, dividing it between them, we call it an “apartment house,” but where one man only dwells, a “house.” And if perchance a physician moves into one of these shops on the street, it is called a “surgery.” But if he moves out and a smith moves into this same shop, it is called a “smithy”; if a fuller, a “laundry”; if a carpenter, a “carpenter's shop”; and if a pimp and his harlots, from the trade itself it gets its name of “brothel.” So that you have made many a house a brothel by the facility with which you have plied your profession. Ask not, then, where it was that you practised it, but make this your defence, that you have never done the thing.
But it seems that we are to have another argument, too, concocted by the same sophist. For he says that nothing is more unjust than common report, and he goes to the market-place for his evidence, the sort of thing that is quite in harmony with his own life. He says first57 that the apartment house in Colonus which is called Demon's is falsely named, for it does not belong to Demon. Again, that the herm called “the Herm of Andocides” is not that of Andocides, but a votive offering of the tribe Aegeis.
and Demosthenes by way of a jest presents himself as an example, for he poses as a man who knows how to indulge in pleasantries and to joke about his own manner of life. “Unless,” he says, “I am to answer to the name when the crowd call me, not Demosthenes, but ‘Batalus,’ just because I got that nickname from my nurse, as my baby-name.”58 And he says that if Timarchus did develop into a handsome youth, and if he is jeered at through slanderous interpretation of that fact, and not because of his own actions, surely he ought not for that reason to fall into misfortune.
But, Demosthenes, in the case of votive offerings, houses, estates, and all dumb objects in general, I do indeed hear many names applied, ever changing, never twice the same; for in them are no actions good or bad, but the man who happens to have become connected with them, whoever he may be, gives them a name according to the greatness of his own reputation. But in the case of the life and conduct of men, a common report which is unerring does of itself spread abroad throughout the city; it causes the private deed to become matter of public knowledge, and many a time it even prophesies what is about to be.
to manifest and so far from being fabricated is this statement of mine, that you will find that both our city and our forefathers dedicated an altar to Common Report, as one of the greatest gods;59 and you will find that Homer again and again in the Iliad says, of a thing that has not yet come to pass, “Common Report came to the host;” and again you will find Euripides declaring that this god is able not only to make known the living, revealing their true characters, but the dead as well, when he says, “Common Report shows forth the good man, even though he be in the bowels of the earth;”
and Hesiod expressly represents her as a goddess, speaking in words that are very plain to those who are willing to understand, for he says, “But Common Report dies never, the voice that tongues of many men do utter. She also is divine.”60 You will find that all men whose lives have been decorous praise these verses of the poets. For all who are ambitious for honor from their fellows believe that it is from good report that fame will come to them. But men whose lives are shameful pay no honor to this god, for they believe that in her they have a deathless accuser.
Call to mind, therefore, fellow citizens, what common report you have been accustomed to hear in the case of Timarchus. The instant the name is spoken you ask, do you not, “What Timarchus do you mean? The prostitute?” Furthermore, if I had presented witnesses concerning any matter, you would believe me; if then I present the god as my witness, will you refuse to believe? But she is a witness against whom it would be impiety even to bring complaint of false testimony.
in the case of Demosthenes, too, it was common report, and not his nurse, that gave him his nickname; and well did common report name him Batalus, for his effeminacy and lewdness! For, Demosthenes, if anyone should strip off those exquisite, pretty mantle of yours, and the soft, pretty shirts that you wear while you are writing your speeches against your friends,61 and should pass them around among the jurors, I think, unless they were informed beforehand, they would be quite at a loss to say whether they had in their hands the clothing of a man or of a woman!
But in the course of the defence one of the generals will, as I am told, mount the platform, with head held high and a self-conscious air, as one who should say, Behold the graduate of the wrestling schools, and the student of philosophy! And he will undertake to throw ridicule upon the whole idea of the prosecution, asserting that this is no legal process that I have devised, but the first step in a dangerous decline in the culture of our youth.62 He will cite first those benefactors of yours, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, describing their fidelity to one another, and telling how in their case this relationship proved the salvation of the state.
63 Indeed, they say he will not even spare the poems of Homer or the names of the heroes, but will celebrate the friendship between Patroclus and Achilles, which, we are told, had its source in passion. And he will pronounce an encomium on beauty now, as though it were not recognised long since as a blessing, if haply it be united with morality. For he says that if certain men by slandering this beauty of body shall cause beauty to be a misfortune to those who possess it, then in your public verdict you will contradict your personal prayers.
For you seem to him, he says, in danger of being strangely inconsistent; for when you are about to beget children, you pray one and all that your sons still unborn may be fair and beautiful in person, and worthy of the city; and yet when you have sons already born, of whom the city may well be proud, if by their surpassing beauty and youthful charm they infatuate one person or another, and become the subject of strife because of the passion they inspire, these sons, as it seems, you propose to deprive of civic rights—because Aeschines tells you to do it.
And just here I understand he is going to carry the war into my territory, and ask me if I am not ashamed on my own part, after having made a nuisance of myself in the gymnasia and having been many times a lover, now to be bringing the practice into reproach and danger. And finally—so I am told—in an attempt to raise a laugh and start silly talk among you, he says he is going to exhibit all the erotic poems I have ever addressed to one person or another, and he promises to call witnesses to certain quarrels and pommellings in which I have been involved in consequence of this habit.
Now as for me, I neither find fault with love that is honorable, nor do I say that those who surpass in beauty are prostitutes. I do not deny that I myself have been a lover and am a lover to this day, nor do I deny that the jealousies and quarrels that commonly arise from the practice have happened in my case. As to the poems which they say I have composed, some I acknowledge, but as to others I deny that they are of the character that these people will impute to them, for they will tamper with them.
The distinction which I draw is this: to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul; but to hire for money and to indulge in licentiousness is the act of a man who is wanton and ill-bred. And whereas it is an honor to be the object of a pure love, I declare that he who has played the prostitute by inducement of wages is disgraced. How wide indeed is the distinction between these two acts and how great the difference, I will try to show you in what I shall next say.
your fathers, when they were laying down laws to regulate the habits of men and those acts that inevitably flow from human nature, forbade slaves to do those things which they thought ought to be done by free men. “A slave,” says the law, “shall not take exercise or anoint himself in the wrestling-schools.” It did not go on to add, “But the free man shall anoint himself and take exercise;” for when, seeing the good that comes from gymnastics, the lawgivers forbade slaves to take part, they thought that in prohibiting them they were by the same words inviting the free.
again, the same lawgiver said, “A slave shall not be the lover of a free boy nor follow after him, or else he shall receive fifty blows of the public lash.” But the free man was not forbidden to love a boy, and associate with him, and follow after him, nor did the lawgiver think that harm came to the boy thereby, but rather that such a thing was a testimony to his chastity. But, I think, so long as the boy is not his own master and is as yet unable to discern who is a genuine friend, and who is not, the law teaches the lover self-control, and makes him defer the words of friendship till the other is older and has reached years of discretion; but to follow after the boy and to watch over him the lawgiver regarded as the best possible safeguard and protection for chastity.
and so it was that those benefactors of the state, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, men pre-eminent for their virtues, were so nurtured by that chaste and lawful love—or call it by some other name than love if you like—and so disciplined, that when we hear men praising what they did, we feel that words are inadequate to the eulogy of their deeds.
But since you make mention of Achilles and Patroclus, and of Homer and the other poets—as though the jury were men innocent of education, while you are people of a superior sort, who feel yourselves quite beyond common folks in learning—that you may know that we too have before now heard and learned a little something, we shall say a word about this also. For since they undertake to cite wise men, and to take refuge in sentiments expressed in poetic measures, look, fellow citizens, into the works of those who are confessedly good and helpful poets, and see how far apart they considered chaste men, who love their like, and men who are wanton and overcome by forbidden lusts.
I will speak first of Homer, whom we rank among the oldest and wisest of the poets. Although he speaks in many places of Patroclus and Achilles, he hides their love and avoids giving a name to their friendship, thinking that the exceeding greatness of their affection is manifest to such of his hearers as are educated men.
For Achilles says somewhere in the course of his lament for the death of Patroclus, as recalling one of the greatest of sorrows, that unwillingly he has broken the promise he had given to Menoetius, the father of Patroclus; for he had promised to bring his son back safe to Opus, if he would send him along with him to Troy, and entrust him to his care. It is evident from this that it was because of love that he undertook to take care of him.
But the verses, which I am about to recite, are these:
““Ah me, I rashly spoke vain words that day When in his halls I cheered Menoetius. I told the hero I would surely bring His famous son to Opus back again, When he had ravaged Ilium, and won His share of spoil. But Zeus does not fulfil To men their every hope. For fate decrees That both of us make red one spot of earth.” ” Hom. Il. 324-329
And indeed not only here do we see his deep distress, but he mourned so sorely for him, that although his mother Thetis cautioned him and told him that if he would refrain from following up his enemies and leave the death of Patroclus unavenged, he should return to his home and die an old man in his own land, whereas if he should take vengeance, he should soon end his life, he chose fidelity to the dead rather than safety. And with such nobility of soul did he hasten to take vengeance on the man who slew his friend, that when all tried to comfort him and urged him to bathe and take food, he swore that he would do none of these things until he had brought the head of Hector to the grave of Patroclus.
And when he was sleeping by the funeral pyre, as the poet says, the ghost of Patroclus stood before him, and stirred such memories and laid upon Achilles such injunctions, that one may well weep, and envy the virtue and the friendship of these men. He prophesies that Achilles too is not far from the end of life, and enjoins upon him, if it he in any wise possible, to make provision that even as they had grown up and lived together, even so when they are dead their bones may be in the same coffer.
weeping, and recalling the pursuits which they had followed together in life, he says, “Never again shall we sit together alone as in the old days, apart from our other friends, and take high counsel,” feeling, I believe, that this fidelity and affection were what they would long for most. But that you may hear the sentiments of the poet in verse also, the clerk shall read to you the verses on this theme which Homer composed.
read first the verses about the vengeance on Hector.
““But since, dear comrade, after thee I go Beneath the earth, I will not bury thee Till here I bring thee Hector's head and arms, The spoils of that proud prince who took thy life.” ” Hom. Il. 18.333-35
Now read what Patroclus says in the dream about their common burial and about the intercourse that they once had with one another.
““For we no longer as in life shall sit Apart in sweet communion. Nay, the doom Appointed me at birth has yawned for me. And fate has destined thee, Achilles, peer Of gods, to die beneath the wall of Troy's Proud lords, fighting for fair-haired Helen's sake. More will I say to thee, pray heed it well: Let not my bones be laid apart from thine, Achilles, but that thou and I may be In common earth, I beg that I may share That golden coffer which thy mother brought To be thine own, even as we in youth Grew up together in thy home. My sire Menoetius brought me, a little lad, from home, From Opus, to your house, for sad bloodshed, That day, when, all unwitting, in childish wrath About the dice, I killed Amphidamas' son. The knightly Peleus took me to his home And kindly reared me, naming me thy squire. So let one common coffer hide our bones.” ” Hom. Il. 23.77
Now to show that it was possible for him to have been saved had he refrained from avenging the death of Patroclus, read what Thetis says.
““Ah me, my son, swift fate indeed will fall On thee, if thou dost speak such words. For know, Swift after Hector's death fate brings thine own. To her divine Achilles, swift of foot, In turn made answer. Straightway let me die, For when my friend was slain, my dearest friend, It was not granted me to succor him.” ” Hom. Il. 18.95
64
Again, Euripides, a poet than whom none is wiser, considering chaste love to be one of the most beautiful things, says somewhere,65 making love a thing to be prayed for:
““There is a love that makes men virtuous And chaste, an envied gift. Such love I crave.” ” Euripides
Again the same poet, in the Phoenix, 66 expresses his opinion, making defence against false charges brought by the father, and trying to persuade men habitually to judge, not under the influence of suspicion or of slander, but by a man's life:
““Many a time ere now have I been made The judge in men's disputes, and oft have heard For one event conflicting witnesses. And so, to find the truth, I, as do all Wise men, look sharp to see the character That marks the daily life, and judge by that. The man who loves companionship of knaves I care not to interrogate. What need Is there? I know too well the man is such As is the company he loves to keep.” ” Euripides
Examine the sentiments, fellow citizens, which the poet expresses. He says that before now he has been made judge of many cases, as you today are jurors; and he says that he makes his decisions, not from what the witnesses say, but from the habits and associations of the accused; he looks at this, how the man who is on trial conducts his daily life, and in what manner he administers his own house, believing that in like manner he will administer the affairs of the state also; and he looks to see with whom he likes to associate. And, finally, he does not hesitate to express the opinion that a man is like those whose “company he loves to keep.” It is right, therefore, that in judging Timarchus you follow the reasoning of Euripides.
How has he administered his own property? He has devoured his patrimony, he has consumed all the wages of his prostitution and all the fruits of his bribery, so that he has nothing left but his shame. With whom does he love to be? Hegesandrus! And what are Hegesandrus' habits? The habits that exclude a man by law from the privilege of addressing the people. What is it that I say against Timarchus, and what is the charge that I have brought? That Timarchus addresses the people, a man who has made himself a prostitute and has consumed his patrimony. And what is the oath that you have taken? To give your verdict on the precise charges that are presented by the prosecution.
But not to dwell too long on the poets, I will recite to you the names of older and well-known men, and of youths and boys, some of whom have had many lovers because of their beauty, and some of whom, still in their prime, have lovers today, but not one of whom ever came under the same accusations as Timarchus. Again, I will tell over to you in contrast men who have prostituted themselves shamefully and notoriously, in order that by calling these to mind you may place Timarchus where he belongs.
First I will name those who have lived the life of free and honorable men. You know, fellow citizens, Crito, son of Astyochus, Pericleides of Perithoedae, Polemagenes, Pantaleon, son of Cleagoras, and Timesitheus the runner, men who were the most beautiful, not only among their fellow citizens, but in all Hellas, men who counted many a man of eminent chastity as lover; yet no man ever censured them.
and again, among the youths and those who are still boys, first, you know the nephew of Iphicrates, the son of Teisias of Rhamnos, of the same name as the defendant. He, beautiful to look upon, is so far from reproach, that the other day at the rural Dionysia when the comedies were being played in Collytus, and when Parmenon the comic actor addressed a certain anapaestic verse to the chorus, in which certain persons were referred to as “big Timarchian prostitutes,” nobody thought of it as aimed at the youth, but, one and all, as meant for you, so unquestioned is your title to the practice. Again, Anticles, the stadium runner, and Pheidias,the brother of Melesias. Although I could name many others, I will stop, lest I seem to be in a way courting their favor by my praise.
But as to those men who are kindred spirits with Timarchus, for fear of arousing their enmity I will mention only those toward whom I am utterly indifferent. Who of you does not know Diophantes, called “the orphan,” who arrested the foreigner and brought him before the archon, whose associate on the bench was Aristophon of Azenia?67 For Diophantes accused the foreigner of having cheated him out of four drachmas in connection with this practice, and he cited the laws that command the archon to protect orphans, when he himself had violated the laws that enjoin chastity. Or what Athenian was not indignant at Cephisodorus, called Molon's son, for having ruined his surpassing beauty by a most infamous life? Or Mnesitheus, known as the cook's son? Or many others, whose names I am willing to forget?
For I have no desire to tell over the whole list of them one by one in a spirit of bitterness. Nay, rather I could wish that I might be at a loss for such examples in my speech, for I love my city. But since we have selected for special mention a few from each of the two classes, on the one side men who have been loved with a chaste love, and on the other men who sin against themselves, now let me ask you this question, and pray answer me: To which class do you assign Timarchus—to those who are loved, or to those who are prostitutes? You see, Timarchus, you are not to be permitted to desert the company which you have chosen and go over to the ways of free men.
But if they shall undertake to say that no man has been a prostitute unless he was hired under contract, and if they demand that I produce writings and witnesses, I ask you first to call to mind the laws concerning prostitution; in them the lawgiver has nowhere made mention of contracts, for he did not inquire whether it was by contract that a person had defiled himself, but in comprehensive terms, no matter how the deed is done, he commands that the man who did it shall take no part in public affairs. And he is right; for the man who in his youth was led by shameful indulgence to surrender honorable ambition, that man, he believed, ought not in later life to be possessed of the citizen's privileges.
In the second place, it is easy to demonstrate the folly of this plea. For we should all acknowledge this, that we enter into contracts because we do not trust one another, the object being that the party who has not violated the written terms may receive satisfaction by verdict of the courts from the one who has. If, therefore, this business needs the help of the courts, those who have served as prostitutes by contract, in case they are wronged, have left them, according to the argument of the defendants, recourse to the protection of the laws. And what would be the plea that either side would advance? Imagine the case, not as something that I am telling you, but as going on before your eyes.
Assume that the man who hired the other is in the right as regards the fact and the man who was hired is in the wrong and has no ground to stand on; or assume the opposite, that the man who was hired is fair and fulfils his engagement, but the man who has plucked the flower of his youth and hired him has broken his word; then imagine that you yourselves are sitting as jury. Now the elder man, when his time allowance and the right to speak are given him,68 will press his accusation vigorously, and looking, of course, into your faces, he will say,
“Fellow citizens, I hired Timarchus to serve me as a prostitute according to the contract that is deposited with Demosthenes”—there is no reason why that statement might not be made!—”but he fails to carry out his engagement with me.” And now, of course, he proceeds to describe this engagement to the jury, telling what it is that a man of that sort is expected to do. Thereupon will not the man be stoned who has hired an Athenian contrary to the laws, and will he not leave the court-room not only sentenced to pay his fine,69 but also convicted of wanton outrage?
But suppose it is not this man, but the one who was hired, that is bringing suit. Now let him come forward and speak—or else let the wise Batalus speak in his stead, that we may know what he will find to say! “Gentlemen of the jury, so-and-so”—it does not matter who—”hired me to be his prostitute for money, and I have done, and still continue to do, according to the terms of the contract, all that a prostitute is under obligation to do; he, however, fails to fulfil the agreement.” Will he not immediately have to face a loud protest from the jurors? For who will not say, “And then do you thrust yourself into the market-place, do you put on a garland,70 do you attempt to do anything else that the rest of us do?” His contract, you see, is of no use to him.
Now let me tell you how it happens that it has become the prevailing custom to say, that persons have in the past become prostitutes “under written contract.” One of our citizens （I will not name him, for I have no desire to make myself hated）, foreseeing none of the consequences which I have just described to you, is said to have served as prostitute according to a contract deposited with Anticles. Now, since he was not a private citizen, but active in politics and subject to scurrilous attack, he caused the city to become accustomed to this expression, and that is the reason why some men ask whether in a given case the practice has been “by written contract.” But the lawgiver did not care how the thing was brought about; on the contrary, if there is a letting for hire in any way whatsoever, the man who does the deed is condemned by him to disgrace.
But nevertheless, although all this is so plainly defined, many irrelevant arguments will be invented by Demosthenes. Possibly, when he sticks to his subject, we might be less indignant with him for the animosity he shows; but when, to the injury of our national rights, he foists in matters that do not belong to the case, then one may well be angry. Philip will be largely in evidence, and the name of Philip's son Alexander is going to be mixed up in it. For in addition to all the rest that is bad in him, this Demosthenes is an ill-mannered and boorish sort of person.
His offensive talk against Philip is foolish and out of place, but not so serious a mistake as that which I am about to mention. For confessedly he will be making his slanderous charges against a man—he who is himself no man. But when he insinuates shameful suspicions against the boy, by deliberately applying to him words of double meaning, he makes our city ridiculous.
For, under the impression that he is hurting me with reference to the accounting which I am about to render for my service on the embassy,71 he says that when the other day he himself was describing the boy Alexander, telling how at a certain banquet of ours he played the cithara, reciting certain passages in which there were thrusts at another boy, and when he reported to the senate what he himself happened to know about the incident, I got angry at his jests at the expense of the boy,72 as though I were not merely a member of the embassy, but one of the boy's own family.
Now I naturally have had no conversation with Alexander, because of his youth, but Philip I do praise now because of his auspicious words, and if in what he does toward us in the future he shall fulfil the promise of what he now says, he will make praise of him a safe and easy thing. I did, indeed, rebuke Demosthenes in the senate-chamber, not because I was counting the favor of the boy, but because I felt that if you should listen to such words as his, the city would show itself as ill-behaved as the speaker.
But, fellow citizens, I beg you not to accept their irrelevant pleas at all, in the first place for the sake of the oaths which you have sworn, in the second place that you may not be misled by a fellow who makes a trade of the manipulation of words. But I will go back a little way for your instruction. Demosthenes, after he had spent his patrimony, went up and down the city, hunting rich young fellows whose fathers were dead, and whose mothers were administering their property. I will omit many instances, and will mention only one of those who were outrageously treated.
he discovered a household that was rich and ill-managed, the head of which was a woman, proud and of poor judgment. A fatherless young man, half crazy, was managing the estate, Aristarchus, son of Moschus. Demosthenes, pretending to be a lover of his, invited the young man to this intimacy, filling him up with empty hopes, assuring him that without any delay whatever he should become the foremost man in public life, and he showed him a list of names.73 So he became prompter and teacher of the young man in conduct which has made Aristarchus an exile from his fatherland,
while Demosthenes, getting hold of the money that was to support him in in his banishment, has cheated him out of three talents, and, at the hands of Aristarchus, Nicodemus of Aphidna has met a violent death, poor man! after having had both eyes knocked out, and that tongue cut off with which he had been wont to speak out freely, trusting in the laws and in you.74
Did you put to death Socrates the sophist, fellow citizens, because he was shown to have been the teacher of Critias, one of the Thirty who put down the democracy, and after that, shall Demosthenes succeed in snatching companions of his own out of your hands, Demosthenes, who takes such vengeance on private citizens and friends of the people for their freedom of speech? At his invitation some of his pupils are here in court to listen to him. For with an eye to business at your expense,75 he promises them, as I understand, that he will juggle the issue and cheat your ears, and you will never know it;
assuring them that, as soon as he shall come forward to speak, the situation shall be reversed, the defendant filled with confidence, the plaintiff confounded, frightened for his own safety; and that he will lug in my speeches, and find fault with the peace which was brought about through Philocrates and myself, until he shall call out such bursts of applause from the jurors that I will not even face him in the court-room to defend myself when I render account of my service on the embassy, but will consider myself lucky if I get off with a moderate fine instead of being punished with death.
So I do beg you by all means not to furnish this sophist with laughter and patronage at your expense. Imagine that you see him when he gets home from the court-room, putting on airs in his lectures to his young men, and telling how successfully he stole the case away from the jury. “I carried the jurors off bodily from the charges brought against Timarchus, and set them on the accuser, and Philip, and the Phocians, and I suspended such terrors before the eyes of the hearers that the defendant began to be the accuser, and the accuser to be on trial; and the jurors forgot what they were to judge; and what they were not to judge, to that they listened.”
But it is your business to take your stand against this sort of thing, and following close on his every step, to let him at no point turn aside nor persist in irrelevant talk; on the contrary, act as you do in a horse-race, make him keep to the track—of the matter at issue. If you do that, you will not fail of respect, and you will have the same sentiments when you are called to enforce laws that you had when you made them; but if you do otherwise, it will appear that when crimes are about to be committed, you foresee them and are angry, but after they have been committed, you no longer care.
To sum it all up, if you punish the wrongdoers, your laws will be good and valid; but if you let them go, good laws, indeed, but valid no longer. And I shall not hesitate to speak out and tell you why I say this. I will explain by means of an illustration. Why do you suppose it is, fellow citizens, that the existing laws are good, but that the decrees of the city are inferior to them,76 and that the verdicts rendered in the courts are sometimes open to censure?
I will explain to you the reason. It is because you enact the laws with no other object than justice, not moved by unrighteous gain, or by either partiality or animosity, looking solely to what is just and for the common good. And because you are, as I think, naturally, more clever than other men, it is not surprising that you pass most excellent laws. But in the meetings of the assembly and in the courts, you oftentimes lose all hold of the discussion of the matter in hand, and are led away by deceit and trickery; and you admit into your cases at law a custom that is utterly unjust, for you allow the defendants to bring counter accusations against the complainants.
and when you have been drawn away from the defence itself, and your minds have become intent on other things, you forget the accusation entirely, and leave the court-room without having received satisfaction from either party—not from the complainant, for you are given no opportunity to vote with reference to him, and not from the defendant, for by his extraneous charges he has brushed aside the original complaints against himself, and gone out of court scot-free. Thus the laws are losing their force, the democracy is being undermined, and the custom is steadily gaining ground. For you sometimes thoughtlessly listen to mere talk that is unsupported by a good life.
Not so the Lacedaemonians （and it is well to imitate virtue even in a foreigner）. For instance, when a certain man had spoken in the assembly of the Lacedaemonians, a man of shameful life but an exceedingly able speaker, and when, we are told, the Lacedaemonians were on the point of voting according to his advice, a man came forward from the Council of Elders77—a body of men whom they reverence and fear, whose age gives its name to that office which they consider the highest, and whom they appoint from among those who have been men of sobriety from boyhood to old age—one of these, it is said, came forward and vehemently rebuked the Lacedaemonians and denounced them in words like these: that the homes of Sparta would not long remain unravaged if the people folIowed such advisers in their assemblies.
at the same time he called forward another of the Lacedaemonians, a certain man who was not gifted in speech, but brilliant in war and distinguished for justice and sobriety, and he ordered him to express as best he could the same sentiments that the former orator had uttered, “In order,” he explained, “that a good man may speak before the Lacedaemonians vote, but that they may not even receive into their ears the voices of proven cowards and rascals.” Such was the advice that the old man, who had lived a pure life from childhood, gave to his fellow citizens. He would have been quick, indeed, to allow Timarchus or the low-lived Demosthenes to take part in public affairs!
But that I may not seem to be flattering the Lacedaemonians, I will make mention of our ancestors also. For so stern were they toward all shameful conduct, and so precious did they hold the purity of their children, that when one of the citizens found that his daughter had been seduced, and that she had failed to guard well her chastity till the time of marriage, he walled her up in an empty house with a horse, which he knew would surely kill her, if she were shut in there with him. And to this day the foundations of that house stand in your city, and that spot is called “the place of the horse and the maid.”
and Solon, the most famous of lawgivers, has written in ancient and solemn manner concerning orderly conduct on the part of the women. For the woman who is taken in the act of adultery he does not allow to adorn herself, nor even to attend the public sacrifices, lest by mingling with innocent women she corrupt them. But if she does attend, or does adorn herself, he commands that any man who meets her shall tear off her garments, strip her of her ornaments, and beat her （only he may not kill or maim her）; for the lawgiver seeks to disgrace such a woman and make her life not worth the living.
and he commands that procurers, men and women, be indicted, and if they are convicted, be punished with death, because to people who lust after sin but hesitate and are ashamed to meet one another, the procurers offer their own shamelessness for pay, and make it possible to discuss the act and to accomplish it.
Such, then, was the judgment of your fathers concerning things shameful and things honorable; and shall their sons let Timarchus go free, a man chargeable with the most shameful practices, a creature with the body of a man defiled with the sins of a woman? In that case, who of you will punish a woman if he finds her in wrong doing? Or what man will not be regarded as lacking intelligence who is angry with her who errs by an impulse of nature,while he treats as adviser78 the man who in despite of nature has sinned against his own body?
How will each man of you feel as he goes home from court? For the person who is on trial is no obscure man, but well known; the law governing the official scrutiny of public speakers is not a trivial law, but a most excellent one; and we must expect that the boys and young men will ask the members of their families how the case was decided.
What then, pray, are you going to answer, you in whose hands the decision now rests, when your sons ask you whether you voted for conviction or acquittal? When you acknowledge that you set Timarchus free, will you not at the same time be overturning our whole system of training the youth? What use is there in keeping attendants for our children, or setting trainers and teachers over them, when those who have been entrusted with the laws allow themselves to be turned into crooked paths of shame?
I am also surprised, fellow citizens, that you who hate the brothel-keeper propose to let the willing prostitute go free. And it seems that a man who is not to be permitted to be a candidate for election by lot for the priesthood of any god, as being impure of body as that is defined by the laws, this same man is to write in our decrees prayers to the August Goddesses79 in behalf of the state. Why then do we wonder at the futility of our public acts, when the names of such public men as this stand at the head of the people's decrees? And shall we send abroad as ambassador a man who has lived shamefully at home, and shall we continue to trust that man in matters of the greatest moment? What would he not sell who has trafficked in the shame of his own body? Whom would he pity who has had no pity on himself?
To whom of you is not the bestiality of Timarchus well known? For just as we recognize the athlete, even without visiting the gymnasia, by looking at his bodily vigor, even so we recognize the prostitute, even without being present at his act, by his shamelessness, his effrontery, and his habits. For he who despises the laws and morality in matters of supreme importance, comes to be in a state of soul which is plainly revealed by his disorderly life.
Many men of this sort you could find who have overthrown cities and have fallen into the greatest misfortunes themselves. For you must not imagine, fellow citizens, that the impulse to wrong doing is from the gods; nay, rather, it is from the wickedness of men; nor that ungodly men are, as in tragedy, driven and chastised by the Furies80 with blazing torches in their hands.
No, the impetuous lusts of the body and insatiate desire—these it is that fill the robbers' bands, that send men on board the pirates' boats; these are, for each man, his Fury, urging him to slay his fellow citizens, to serve the tyrant, to help put down the democracy. For such men reck not of disgrace, nor yet of punishment to come, but are beguiled by the pleasures they expect if they succeed. Therefore, fellow citizens, remove from among us such natures, for so shall you turn the aspirations of the young toward virtue.
And be assured—I earnestly beg of you to remember what I am about to say—be assured that if Timarchus shall pay the penalty for his practices, you will lay the foundation for orderly conduct in this city; but if he shall be cleared, the case had better never have been tried. For before Timarchus came to trial, the law and the name of the courts did cause some men to fear; but if the leader in indecency and the most notorious man of all shall once have been brought into court and then come safely off, many will be induced to offend; and it will finally be, not what is said, but the desperate situation, that will arouse your anger.
therefore punish one man, and do not wait till you have a multitude to punish; and be on your guard against their machinations and their advocates. I will name no one of these, lest they make that their excuse for speaking, saying that they would not have come forward had not someone mentioned them by name. But this I will do: I will omit their names, but by describing their habits will make known their persons also. And each man will have only himself to blame if he comes up here and displays his impudence.
three sorts of supporters, namely, are going to come into court to help the defendant: firstly, men who have squandered their patrimony by the extravagance of their daily life; secondly, men who have abused their youth and their own bodies, and now are afraid, not for Timarchus, but for themselves and their own habits, lest they one day be called to account; and still others from the ranks of the licentious, and of those who have freely associated with licentious men; for they would have certain men rely on their aid, and thus be the more ready to indulge in wrong-doing.
therefore you hear the pleas of these men in his support, call to mind their lives, and bid those who have sinned against their own bodies to cease annoying you and to stop speaking before the people; for the law investigates, not men in private station, but those who are in public life. And tell those who have eaten up their patrimony to go to work, and find some new way to get their living. And as for the hunters of such young men as are easily trapped, command them turn their attention to the foreigners and the resident aliens, that they may still indulge their predilection, but without injuring you.
And now I have fulfilled all my obligation to you: I have explained the laws, I have examined the life of the defendant. Now, therefore, you are judges of my words, and soon I shall be spectator of your acts, for the decision of the case is now left to your judgment. If, therefore, you do what is right and best, we on our part shall, if it be your wish, be able more zealously to call wrongdoers to account.
1 The Athenian Constitution provided for rigid auditing of the accounts of all officials at the close of their year of office, and gave full opportunity to any citizen to bring charges against any act of their administration. Such opportunity might easily be used for malicious or blackmailing attack
2 A quiet citizen, as distinguished from the professional political blackmailer, συκοφάντης
3 As the speech proceeds we shall see that Aeschines declares that Timarchus was guilty of immoral practices that disqualified him from speaking before the people.
4 Dances by specially trained groups of boys, often competive between tribes, were popular features of many of the Greek festivals. Those dances which were arranged for a circular dancing-ground were called “cyclic”.
5 The son, as one whose person had been prostituted, was debarred from addressing the assembly of the people. cp. Aeschin. 1.3.
6 The myrtle wreath was worn as sign of the sacred character of the office, and it protected the person from assault.
7 “It was custom at Athens to purify the ecclesia, the theatres, and the gatherings of the people in general by the sacrifice of very small pigs, which they named καθάρσια.”—Harpocration
8 The above interpretation is confirmed by Aristot. Const. Ath. 43.1.29 f., where we find the same phraseology, evidently that of the law itself. Heralds, whose person was inviolate even in time of war, were often sent to carry messages from one state to another. They frequently prepared the way for negotiations to be conducted by ambassadors, appointed for the special occasion.
9 That is, any citizen who is not disqualified by some loss of civic privilege inflicted as a penalty. Aeschines has in mind the fact that a man like Timarchus would not have the privilege.
10 Aristot. Const. Ath. 28.3） says of Cleon: “He was the first to use unseemly shouting and coarse abuse on the Bema, and to harangue the people with his cloak girt up short about him, whereas all his predecessors had spoken decently and in order. （Kenyon's trans.）
11 The Athenian ῥήτωρ was both public speaker and political leader. The profession was definite and well recognised. No one English word covers both the political and the oratorical activity of the profession.
All public officials were required to submit to a fomal scrutiny （δοκιμασία） before taking office. The examining body was usually a law-court; in the case of the archons it was a court, after a preliminary hearing by the senate; senators elect appeared before the outgoing senate. From our passage it appears that a sort of “scrutiny” might be applied to the men who made politics their profession, without regard to any office for which they might be candidates.
12 That is, any man who is not debarred, by crimes of his own, from the ordinary privileges of the courts.
13 You, the people as jurymen.
14 See Aeschin. 1.26.
15 We can only conjecture that the members of this tribe were given the block of seats immediately in front of the platform, and were expected to enforce the commands of the presiding officers, the nine πρόεδροι.
16 By “orderly conduct” Aeschines means orderly conduct in private life. The editor who composed （or compiled） the law given in Aeschin. 1.35 understood him to be speaking of conduct on the platform. The law that Aeschines caused to be read would contain the prohibitions that he has been discussing in Aeschin. 1.28-32.
17 The new law described in Aeschin. 1.33.
18 That is, “forgiven and forgotten,” as were the crimes of the supporters of the Thirty Tyrants after the restoration of the democracy, in the archonship of Eucleides, 403/2.
19 That is, Misgolas can testify to the truth of the affidavit without thereby testifying to any criminal act of his own.
20 It is evident from this that when a formal summons to testify in court was refused, a definite fine was inflicted.
21 All Athenian young men were required to undergo military training during the two years following their eighteenth birthday. The first year they were in garrison at the Piraeus. At the close of the year, after a public exhibition of their military attainments, they received a shield and spear from the state, and then were sent out for another year to garrison the forts and patrol the borders.
22 Between 363 and 359 one Athenian general after another was condemned to death or heavily fined for lack of success in the North. Timomachus was sent into banishment.
23 Probably the scholiast is right in explaining ἀστραγάλους διασείστους “shaken astragali,” as the gamester's name for a sort of dice. Perhaps the hearers would understand that they were loaded dice. Benseler, however, approves Dorville's explanation, that these dice had been many a time before now “shaken” between Pittalacus and the rascals who are now tossing them into the street.
24 Proceedings in court in behalf of an ordinary slave would be conducted by his master in his own name; but Pittalacus was a state slave （Aeschin. 1.54）. Probably he would have to bring suit under the name of some citizen as his protector （προστάτης）.
25 Suits between Glaucon and Hegesandrus, who claimed that Pittalacus was a slave of his.
26 Crobylus, “Top-knot,” was the nickname of Hegesippus, associate of Demosthenes in the anti-Macedonian agitation. He owed his name to his old-fashioned way of wearing his hair.
27 The comparative freedom of a state-slave in place of the slavery that Hegesandrus had attempted to impose on him.
28 The Clerk of the Court now reads the affidavit, and calls on Hegesandrus to swear to it. He refuses.
29 A person whose name was thrown out by the decision of the members of the deme had an appeal to the courts.
30 Each juror was provided with two small disks, one with a solid stem through the middle, the other with a hollow stem. The juror who wished to vote for conviction cast the disk with the hollow stem, and vice versa. The unusual ballot was dropped into another urn. As the juror came forward with the two disks, one in each hand, the ends of the stem pressed between thumb and forefinger, even the nearest bystander could not see which disk he cast to be counted, and which he discarded.
31 Fortunately the modern reader is spared a knowledge of the double entente that made the vulgar listeners laugh when a man like Timarchus used the words τεῖχος, πύργος, and ἀπάγειν. Probably πύργος suggested the women's apartments, and ἀπάγειν may have suggested seduction.
32 The first step in the process was for Aeschines, at a meeting of the assembly, formally to summon Timarchus to legal scrutiny （δοκιμασία） of his right to speak before the people.
33 Evidently the region was a disreputable one, and the houses known as cheap places of ill repute.
34 Apparently the speaker meant that Timarchus thought that in this time of peace, with its small demands on the treasury, only a light burden would fall on each citizen, if the state should carry out the local improvements proposed, perhaps the clearing away of the disreputable houses from the slope of the hill.
35 It is not unlikely that the vulgar crowd made merry over the word οἰκοπέδων as sounding like ὀρχιδέδων（testicles）, and λάκκων like λακκοπέδων （scrota）.
36 Demophilus was the author of the proposition to revise the citizen lists.
37 Aeschines names this speech-writer in Aeschin. 1.119.
38 Such a fortune would have been enough to enable the ordinary man to perform the special honorable services demanded of rich citizens, to be trierarch, choregus, etc.
39 Masters sometimes allowed their slaves to buy their time at so much per day; this fee was called ἀποφορά. Such slaves could do business for themselves, or hire themselves out to manufacturers, contractors, etc. Much of the skilled labor of the city was performed by slaves.
40 The MSS. vary between the readings ποιητῇ poet and ὑποκριτῇ actor. Suidas attests the name Nausicrates as that of a comic poet, and mentions two of his comedies. The name occurs in an Attic inscription （I.G.ii. 977） in a list of comic poets, but the same inscription gives the name in a list of comic actors also.
41 The special demands made by the state on the rich citizens, like the trierarchy, choregia, etc.
42 The same men would act as administrators of the undivided estate and as guardians of the boy during his minority.
43 “The Senate also examines the infirm paupers. For there is a law that provides that persons who have property of less than three minas and are so infirm of body as to be unable to do any work, are to be examined by the Senate, and to receive from the state two obols each per day for their support.”—Aristot. Const. Ath. 49. （Kenyon's trans.）.
44 Aeschines calls it the “prytany payment.” Probably the payment was made prytany by prytany, the prytany being one of the ten regular subdivisions of the civil year.
45 The Athenian constitution provided for a rigorous system of accounting by all public officers at the close of their year of office. Not only their handling of public funds, but every official act, was passed upon by a board of state auditors （Λογισταί）. The findings of the auditors were subject to review by a court.
46 The 9 obols is the interest per month, 1.5 drachmas on the hundred drachmas, or 18 percent per year. Ordinary interest rates ran from 12 percent to 18 percent.
47 The year 361/60 B.C.
48 Ten treasurers, οἱ ταμίαι τῆς Ἀθηνᾶς, appointed annually by lot, had the care of the treasures and revenues of the Parthenon （Aristot. Const. Ath. 47.）. It appears that they also had custody of any state funds that were for the time being unappropriated, the Opistheodomos of the Parthenon serving as their treasury.
49 At the close of their year of office the senate had become accustomed to expect a vote of the popular assembly bestowing a crown （garland） as a testimonial for their services.
50 The senators had been sitting with the other citizens as members of the assembly. After the adjournment of the assembly, the senate resumed its session.
51 It appears that on the question of the expulsion of a member there was a preliminary vote with leaves as ballots, and a final one with the ordinary ballots.
52 “All the magistrates that are concerned with the ordinary routine of administration are elected by lot, except the Military Treasurer, the Commissioners of the Theoric Fund, and the Superintendent of Springs. These are elected by vote, and the magistrates thus elected hold office from one Panathenaic festival to another. All military officers are also elected by vote.”—Aristot. Const. Ath. 43. （Kenyon's trans.）.
53 The handling of the funds for the payment of mercenary troops gave such opportunities for dishonesty, especially in the padding of the rolls, that inspectors were sent out to check the accounts on the spot.
54 See on Aeschin. 1.77.
55 The scholiast tells us that these gods were Apollo, Demeter, and Zeus.
56 The reference is to Demosthenes, who, we must from this statement conclude, was in his earlier years a professional teacher of rhetoric, as well as a lawyer and politician.
57 Some of Aeschines' anticipations of the arguments of his opponents would be possible in the preparation of his speech for the court-room; others were probably added to the speech as prepared for publication, after the speeches for the defence had been heard. Probably some of these were given extempore in court.
58 On the nickname, see Aeschin. 2.99.
59 The scholiast tells us that this altar was dedicated to commemorate news of a victory of Cimon's in Pamphylia, received at Athens the day the battle was fought. Paus. 1.17.1） attests the existence of the altar.
60 The quotation from Hesiod is from Hes. WD 763 f.; that from Euripides is not found in any of the extant plays, nor do we find the Homeric phrase in the Iliad. Indeed, the word φήμη does not occur in the Iliad, and it is found only three times in the Odyssey（Hom. Od. 2.35; Hom. Od. 20.100, Hom. Od. 20.105）, where it is used of words of ominous meaning.
61 Writing speeches against his former friends is as brave an act as Demosthenes is capable of, and the only armor that he knows or needs is his soft shirt! Aeschines is smarting under the fact that Demosthenes, who, in the beginning of the negotiations with Philip for peace, had been on good terms with himself, has now caused his indictment for treason, and will shortly conduct the prosecution in court.
62 Probably the hearers would be quick to catch the half-hidden thought suggested by the word ἀπαιδευσία. The Athenian gentlemen did indeed “cultivate” the handsome boys and young men, and for most immoral purposes. The culture that the boys received was too often not εὐπαιδευσία, but παιδεραστία.
63 The story was that the tyrant Hipparchus sought to become the lover of Harmodius, who was loved by Aristogeiton, and that the jealousies of this παιδεραστία led to the liberation of the state.
64 The above quotations from Homer show considerable variations from our MSS. of the poet. It seems that Aeschines was using a very corrupt text of Homer. In Hom. Il. 18.324 ff., there is variation in one word; in Hom. Il. 18.333-35, in two words; the long passage from Hom. Il. 23.77 has two lines that are not found in our MSS. of the Iliad, one line that is changed in position, and four that show verbal changes. The quotation from Hom. Il. 18.95-99 shows a verbal change in one line, and an entire change in the last half-line.
That widely divergent texts of Homer were in circulation as early as the time of Aeschines has been proved by the papyrus fragments.
65 In the lost Sthenoboea, No. 672, Nauck.
66 No. 812, Nauck.
67 The archon eponymus is meant. When sitting as president of a court he was assisted by two advisers, πάρεδροι.
68 Each speaker was given a definite time allowance, measured by the water-clock; hence the expression, ἀποδοθέντος τοῦ ὕδατος, “when the water is given him.”
69 In certain classes of private suits, if the plaintiff failed to receive one-fifth of the votes of the jury, he had to pay to the defendant one-sixth of the sum for which he had sued （one obol in the drachma （= six obols）, hence the name ἐπωβελία）.
70 See the note on Aeschin. 1.19.
71 See the Introduction to Aeschin. 2.
72 The words of double meaning that Aeschines says Demosthenes applied to the boy Alexander would be connected with the story of this “playing” and “reciting.”
73 Doubtless a list of young men who had studied oratory with Demosthenes and become successful public men. So the Scholiast.
74 The murdered man, Nicodemus, was a friend and supporter of Demosthenes' influential personal and political enemies, Meidias and Eubulus, and had taken part in an unsuccessful attempt to convict Demosthenes of desertion in the Euboean campaign. When he was found murdered, Meidias made repeated attempts to throw suspicion on Demosthenes.
75 Success in this case will increase Demosthenes' reputation, and bring him more pupils and tuition fees.
76 A law （νόμος） could be enacted or amended only by a special legislative commission, by an elaborate process, under careful precautions, at a fixed time in the civil year. A decree （ψήφισμα） could he passed any day by joint action of senate and assembly, and as easily amended or repealed.
77 The Council of Elders （Γέροντες） consisted of twenty-eight men, elected by the people from those nobles who had passed their sixtieth year; an elder thus elected held the office the rest of his life.
78 The question at issue is whether Timarchus is to be allowed to continue to be an adviser of the city, by speaking in the assembly of the people.
79 The Eumenides.
80 The Furies （Poenae） are gods of punishment, more definitely personified in the Erinyes. The hearers would be reminded of the chasing of Orestes in the Eumenidesof Aeschylus.
I beg you, fellow citizens, to hear me with willing and friendly mind, remembering how great is my peril, and how many the charges against which I have to defend myself; remembering also the arts and devices of my accuser, and the cruelty of the man who, speaking to men who are under oath to give equal hearing to both parties, had the effrontery to urge you not to listen to the voice of the defendant.
and it was not anger that made him say it; for no man who is lying is angry with the victim of his calumny, nor do men who are speaking the truth try to prevent the defendant from obtaining a hearing; for the prosecution does not find justification in the minds of the hearers until the defendant has had opportunity to plead for himself and has proved unable to refute the charges that have been preferred.
But Demosthenes, I think, is not fond of fair argument, nor is that the sort of preparation he has made. No, it is your anger that he is determined to call forth. And he has accused me of receiving bribes—he who would be the last man to make such suspicion credible! For the man who seeks to arouse the anger of his hearers over bribery must himself refrain from such conduct.
But, fellow citizens, as I have listened to Demosthenes' accusation, the effect upon my own mind has been this: never have I been so apprehensive as on this day, nor ever more angry than now, nor so exceedingly rejoiced. I was frightened, and am still disturbed, lest some of you form a mistaken judgment of me, beguiled by those antitheses of his, conceived in deliberate malice. And I was indignant—fairly beside myself at the charge, when he accused me of insolence and drunken violence towards a free woman of Olynthus.1 But I was rejoiced when, as he was dwelling on this charge, you refused to listen to him. This I consider to be the reward that you bestow upon me for a chaste and temperate life.
To you I do, indeed, give praise and high esteem for putting your faith in the life of those who are on trial, rather than in the accusations of their enemies; however, I would not myself shrink from defending myself against this charge. For if there is any man among those who are standing outside the bar—and almost the whole city is in the court—or if there is any man of you, the jurors, who is convinced that I have ever perpetrated such an act, not to say towards a free person, but towards any creature, I hold my life as no longer worth the living. And if as my defence proceeds I fail to prove that the accusation is false, and that the man who dared to utter it is an impious slanderer, then, even though it be clear that I am innocent of all the other charges, I declare myself worthy of death.
But strange indeed did that other argument of his seem to me, and outrageously unjust, when he asked you whether it was possible in one and the same city to sentence Philocrates to death because he would not await trial and so condemned himself, and then to acquit me. But I think that on this very ground I ought most certainly to be cleared for if the man who condemns himself by not awaiting trial is guilty, certainly he who denies the charge and submits his person to the laws and to his fellow citizens is not guilty.
Now, fellow citizens, as regards the rest of his accusations, if I pass over any point and fail to mention it, I beg of you to question me and let me know what it is that you wish to hear about, and to refrain from forming any judgment in advance, but to listen with impartial goodwill. I do not know where I ought to begin, so inconsistent are his accusations. See whether you think I am being treated in a reasonable way.
it is I who am now on trial, and that too for my life; and yet the greater part of his accusation has been directed against Philocrates and Phrynon and the other members of the embassy, against Philip and the peace and the policies of Eubulus; it is only as one among all these that he gives me a place. But when it is a question of solicitude for the interests of the state, one solitary man stands out in all his speech—Demosthenes; all the rest are traitors! For he has unceasingly insulted us and poured out his slanderous lies, not upon me alone, but upon all the rest as well.
and after treating a man with such contempt, later, when it suits his whim, he turns about, and as though he were accusing an Alcibiades or a Themistocles, the most famous men among all the Greeks, he proceeds to charge that same man with having destroyed the cities in Phocis, with having lost you the Thracian coast, with having expelled from his kingdom Cersobleptes, a friend and ally of the city.
and he undertook to liken me to Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, and vehemently and with loud cries he called upon you to be on your guard against me; and he related the dream of the priestess in Sicily.2 Then, after all this exaggeration, he begrudged me the credit even for what he had slanderously charged me with accomplishing, and ascribed it all, not to my words, but to the arms of Philip.
When now a man has shown such trickery and effrontery, it is difficult even to remember every single thing, and in the face of danger it is not easy to answer unexpected slanders. But I will begin with those events which I think will enable me to make my presentation most clear and intelligible to you, and fair; these events are the discussion that took place concerning the peace, and the choice of the ambassadors. In this way I shall best remember his charges and best be able to speak effectively, and you will be best instructed.
There is one thing, at any rate, which I think you all yourselves remember: how the ambassadors from Euboea, after they had discussed with our assembly the question of our making peace with them, told us that Philip also had asked them to report to you that he wished to come to terms and be at peace with you. Not long after this, Phrynon of Rhamnus was captured by privateers, during the Olympian truce, according to his own complaint.3 Now when he had been ransomed and had come home, he asked you to choose an envoy to go to Philip in his behalf, in order that, if possible, he might recover his ransom money. You were persuaded, and chose Ctesiphon as envoy for him.
When Ctesiphon returned from his mission, he first reported to you on the matters for which he was sent, and then in addition he said that Philip declared that he had gone to war with you against his own will, and that he wished, even now, to be rid of the war. When Ctesiphon had said this and had also told of the marked kindness of his reception, the people eagerly accepted his report and passed a vote of praise for Ctesiphon. Not a voice was raised in opposition. Then it was, and not till then, that Philocrates of Hagnus offered a motion, which was passed by unanimous vote of the people that Philip be allowed to send to us a herald and ambassadors to treat for peace. For up to this time even that had been prevented by certain men who made it their business to do so, as the event itself proved.
for they attacked the motion as unconstitutional,4 subscribing the name of Lycinus to the indictment, in which they proposed a penalty of one hundred talents. When the case came to trial Philocrates was ill, and called as his advocate Demosthenes, not me. And Demosthenes the Philip-hater came to the platform and used up the day in his plea for the defence. Finally Philocrates acquitted, and the prosecutor failed to receive the fifth part of the votes.5 This is matter of common knowledge.
Now about the same time Olynthus was taken, and many of our citizens were captured there, among them Iatrocles, brother of Ergochares, and Eueratus, son of Strombichus. Their families naturally made supplication in their behalf, and begged you to provide for them. Their spokesmen before the people were Philocrates and Demosthenes, not Aeschines. So Aristodemus the actor is sent as envoy to Philip, as being an acquaintance of his, and of a profession that naturally wins friends.
But when Aristodemus returned from his mission, his report to the senate was delayed by certain business of his, and meanwhile Iatrocles came back from Macedonia, released by Philip without ransom. Then many people were angry with Aristodemus for having failed to make his report, for they heard from Iatrocles the same story about Philip.6
Finally Democrates of Aphidna went before the senate and persuaded them to summon Aristodemus. One of the senators was Demosthenes, my accuser! Aristodemus appeared before them, reported Philip's great friendliness toward the city, and added this besides, that Philip even wished to become an ally of our state. This he said not only before the senate, but also at an assembly of the people. Here again Demosthenes spoke no word in opposition, but even moved that a crown be conferred on Aristodemus.
Next Philocrates moved that ten ambassadors be chosen to go to Philip and discuss with him both the question of peace and the common interests of the Athenians and Philip. At the election of the ten ambassadors I was nominated by Nausicles, but Philocrates himself nominated Demosthenes—Demosthenes, the man who now accuses Philocrates.
and so eager was Demosthenes for the business, that in order to make it possible for Aristodemus to be a member of our embassy without financial loss to himself, he moved that we elect envoys to go to the cities in which Aristodemus was under contract to act, and beg in his behalf the cancelling of his forfeitures. To prove the truth of this, take, if you please, the decrees, and read the deposition of Aristodemus, and call the witnesses before whom the deposition was made, in order that the jury may know who was the good friend of Philocrates, and who it was that promised to persuade the people to bestow the rewards on Aristodemus.“Decrees”“Deposition”
The whole affair, therefore, from the beginning originated not with me, but with Demosthenes and Philocrates. And on the embassy he was eager to belong to our mess—not with my consent, but with that of my companions, Aglaocreon of Tenedos, whom you chose to represent the allies, and Iatrocles. And he asserts that on the journey I urged him to join me in guarding against the beast—meaning Philocrates. But the whole story was a fabrication; for how could I have urged Demosthenes against Philocrates, when I knew that he had been Philocrates' advocate in the suit against the legality of his motion, and that he had been nominated to the embassy by Philocrates?
Moreover, this was not the sort of conversation in which we were engaged, but all the way we were forced to put up with Demosthenes' odious and insufferable ways. When we were discussing what should be said, and when Cimon remarked that he was afraid Philip would get the better of us in arguing his claims, Demosthenes promised fountains of oratory, and said that he was going to make such a speech about our claims to Amphipolis and the origin of the war that he would sew up Philip's mouth with an unsoaked rush,7 and he would persuade the Athenians to permit Leosthenes to return home,8 and Philip to restore Amphipolis to Athens.
But not to describe at length the overweening self-confidence of this fellow, as soon as we were come to Macedonia, we arranged among ourselves that at our audience with Philip the eldest should speak first, and the rest in the order of age. Now it happened that the youngest man of us was, according to his own assertion, Demosthenes. When we were summoned—and pray now give especial attention to this, for here you shall see the exceeding enviousness of the man, and his strange cowardice and meanness too, and such plottings against men who were his own fellow ambassadors and his messmates as one would hardly enter into even against his bitterest enemies. For you remember he says9 it is the salt of the city and the table of the state for which he has most regard—he, who is no citizen born—for I will out with it!—nor akin to us.10
But we, who have shrines and family tombs in our native land, and such life and intercourse with you as belong to free men, and lawful marriage, with its offspring and connections, we while at Athens were worthy of your confidence, or you would never have chosen us, but when we had come to Macedonia we all at once turned traitors! But the man who had not one member of his body left unsold, posing as a second Aristeides “the Just,” is displeased, and spits on us, as takers of bribes.
Hear now the pleas that we made in your behalf, and again those which stand to the credit of Demosthenes, that great benefactor of the state, in order that I may answer one after another and in full detail each one of his accusations. But I commend you exceedingly, gentlemen of the jury, that in silence and with fairness you are listening to us. If, therefore, I fail to refute any one of his accusations, I shall have myself, not you, to blame.
So when the older men had spoken on the object of our mission, our turn came.11 All that I said there and Philip's reply, I reported fully in your assembly in the presence of all the citizens, but I will try to recall it to you now in a summary way.
In the first place, I described to him our traditional friendship and your generous services to Amyntas, the father of Philip, recalling them all one after another, and omitting nothing. Secondly, I reminded him of services of which he himself had been both witness and recipient. For shortly after the death of Amyntas, and of Alexander, the eldest of the brothers, while Perdiccas and Philip were still children, when their mother Eurydice had been betrayed by those who professed to be their friends,
and when Pausanias was coming back to contend for the throne,12 an exile then, but favoured by opportunity and the support of many of the people, and bringing a Greek force with him, and when he had already seized Anthemon, Therma, Strepsa, and certain other places, at a time when the Macedonians were not united, but most of them favoured Pausanias: at this crisis the Athenians elected Iphicrates as their general to go against Amphipolis—for at that time the people of Amphipolis were holding their city themselves and enjoying the products of the land.
When Iphicrates had come into this region—with a few ships at first, for the purpose of examining into the situation rather than of laying siege to the city— “Then,” said I, “your mother Eurydice sent for him, and according to the testimony of all who were present, she put your brother Perdiccas into the arms of Iphicrates, and set you upon his knees—for you were a little boy—and said, ‘Amyntas, the father of these little children, when he was alive, made you his son,13 and enjoyed the friendship of the city of Athens; we have a right therefore to consider you in your private capacity a brother of these boys, and in your public capacity a friend to us.’
After this she at once began to make earnest entreaty in your behalf and in her own, and for the maintenance of the throne—in a word for full protection. When Iphicrates had heard all this, he drove Pausanias out of Macedonia and preserved the dynasty for you.” Next I spoke about Ptolemaeus, who had been made regent, telling what an ungrateful and outrageous thing he had done: I explained how in the first place he continually worked against our city in the interest of Amphipolis, and when we were in controversy with the Thebans, made alliance with them; and then how Perdiccas, when he came to the throne, fought for Amphipolis against our city.
And I showed that, wronged as you were, you maintained your friendly attitude; for I told how, when you had conquered Perdiccas in the war, under the generalship of Callisthenes, you made a truce with him, ever expecting to receive some just return. And I tried to remove the ill feeling that was connected with this affair by showing that it was not the truce with Perdiccas that led the people to put Callisthenes to death, but other causes. And again I did not hesitate to complain of Philip himself, blaming him for having taken up in his turn the war against our state.
As proof of all my statements, I offered the letters of the persons in question, the decrees of the people, and Callisthenes' treaty of truce. Now the facts about our original acquisition both of the district and of the place called Ennea Hodoi,14 and the story of the sons of Theseus, one of whom, Acamas, is said to have received this district as the dowry of his wife—all this was fitting to the occasion then, and was given with the utmost exactness, but now I suppose I must be brief; but those proofs which rested, not on the ancient legends, but on occurrences of our own time, these also I called to mind.
For at a congress15 of the Lacedaemonian allies and the other Greeks, in which Amyntas, the father of Philip, being entitled to a seat, was represented by a delegate whose vote was absolutely under his control, he joined the other Greeks in voting to help Athens to recover possession of Amphipolis. As proof of this I presented from the public records the resolution of the Greek congress and the names of those who voted.
“Now,” said I, “a claim which Amyntas renounced in the presence of all the Greeks, and that not by words alone, but by his vote, that claim you his son have no right to advance. But if you argue that it is right for you to keep the place because you took it in war, if it is true that it was a war against us in which you took the city, you do hold it justly, by right of conquest; but if it was from the Amphipolitans that you took a city which belonged to the Athenians, it is not the property of the Amphipolitans that you are holding, but territory of Athens.”16
Now when I had said this and more beside, at last came Demosthenes' turn to speak. All were intent, expecting to hear a masterpiece of eloquence. For, as we learned afterwards, his extravagant boasting had been reported to Philip and his court. So when all were thus prepared to listen, this creature mouthed forth a proem—an obscure sort of thing and as dead as fright could make it; and getting on a little way into the subject he suddenly stopped speaking and stood helpless; finally he collapsed completely.
Philip saw his plight and bade him take courage, and not to think, as though he were an actor on the stage, that his collapse was an irreparable calamity, but to keep cool and try gradually to recall his speech, and speak it off as he had prepared it. But he, having been once upset, and having forgotten what he had written, was unable to recover himself; nay, on making a second attempt, he broke down again. Silence followed; then the herald bade us withdraw.
Now when we were by ourselves, our worthy colleague Demosthenes put on an exceedingly sour face and declared that I had ruined the city and the allies. And when not only I, but all the rest of the ambassadors were amazed, and asked him his reason for saying that, he asked me if I had forgotten the situation at Athens, and if I did not remember that the people were worn out and exceedingly anxious for peace.
“Or does your confidence rest,” said he, “on those fifty ships that have been voted but are never going to be manned? You have so exasperated Philip by the speech you have made that the effect of it could not possibly be to make peace out of war, but implacable war out of peace!” I was just beginning to answer him, when the attendants summoned us.
When we had come in and taken our seats, Philip began at the beginning and undertook to make some sort of answer to every argument which we had advanced. Naturally he dwelt especially on my argument, for I think I may fairly say that I had omitted nothing that could be said; and again and again he mentioned my name in the course of his argument. But in reply to Demosthenes, who had made such a laughing.stock of himself, not one word was said on a single point, I believe. And you may be sure that this was pain and anguish to him.
But when Philip turned to expressions of friendship, and the bottom dropped out of the slander which this Demosthenes had previously uttered against me before our fellow ambassadors, that I was going to be the cause of disagreement and war, then indeed it was plain to see that he was altogether beside himself, so that even when we were invited to dinner he behaved with shameful rudeness.
When we set out on our return home after completing our mission, suddenly he began talking to each of us on the way in a surprisingly friendly manner. Why, up to that time I had never so much as known the meaning of words like “kerkops,” or the so-called “paipalema,” or “palimbolon”17 but now after acquiring him as expounder of the mysteries of all rascality, I am fully instructed.
and he would take each of us in turn to one side, and to one he would promise to open a subscription to help him in his private difficulties, and to another that he would get him elected general. As for me, he fol- lowed me about, congratulating me on my ability and praising my speech; so lavish was he in his compliments that I became sick and tired of him. And when we were all dining together at Larisa, he made fun of himself and the embarrassment which had come upon him in his speech, and he declared that Philip was the most wonderful man under the sun.
When I had added my testimony, saying something like this, that Philip had shown excellent memory in his reply to what we had said, and when Ctesiphon, who was the oldest of us, speaking of his own advanced age and the number of his years, added that in all his many years he had never looked upon so charming and lovable a man, then this Sisyphus18 here clapped his hands and said,
“But, Ctesiphon, it will never do for you to tell the people that, nor would our friend here,” meaning me, “venture to say to the Athenians that Philip is a man of good memory and great eloquence.” And we innocently, not foreseeing the trick of which you shall hear presently, allowed him to bind us in a sort of agreement that we would say this to you.19 And he begged me earnestly not to fail to tell how Demosthenes also said something in support of our claim to Amphipolis.
Now up to this point I am supported by the testimony of my colleagues in the embassy, whom he has reviled and slandered from beginning to end of his accusation. But his words on the platform in your presence you yourselves have heard; so it will not be possible for me to misrepresent them. And I beg of you to continue to hear patiently the rest of my narrative. I do not forget that each of you is anxious to hear the story of Cersobleptes and the charges made about the Phocians, and I am eager to get to those subjects; but you will not be as well able to follow them unless you shall first hear all that preceded. And if, in my peril, you allow me to speak as I wish, you will be able to save me, if I am innocent, and that on good and sufficient grounds; and you will also have before you the facts that are acknowledged as you proceed to examine the points that are in dispute.
On our return, then, after we had rendered to the senate a brief report of our mission and had delivered the letter from Philip, Demosthenes praised us to his colleagues in the senate, and he swore by Hestia, goddess of the senate,20 that he congratulated the city on having sent such men on the embassy, men who in honesty and eloquence were worthy of the state.
In referring to me he said something like this: that I had not disappointed the hopes of those who elected me to the embassy. And to cap it all he moved that each of us be crowned with a garland of wild olive because of our loyalty to the people, and that we be invited to dine on the morrow in the Prytaneum. To prove that I have spoken to you nothing but the truth, please let the clerk take the decree, and let him read the testimony of my colleagues in the embassy.“Decree”“Testimony”
Now when we presented the report of our embassy before the assembly, Ctesiphon came for ward first and spoke, including in his account the points that he was to make according to his agreement with Demosthenes, I mean about Philip's social accomplishments, his personal appearance, and his doughty deeds at the cups. Next Philocrates and Dercylus spoke briefly; then I came forward.
After giving an account of our mission in general, I went on to say, according to the agreement with my colleagues on the embassy, that Philip showed both memory and eloquence when he spoke. And I did not forget what Demosthenes had asked me to mention, namely, that we had agreed that he was to speak about Amphipolis, in case any point should have been passed over by the rest of us.
After we had spoken, last of all Demosthenes arose, and with that imposing air of his, and rubbing his forehead, when he saw that the people approved my report and were satisfied with it, he said that he was amazed at both parties, as well the listeners as the ambassadors, for they were carelessly wasting time—the listeners wasting the time for taking counsel, the ambassadors the time for giving it, all of them amusing themselves with foreign gossip, when they ought to be giving attention to our own affairs; for nothing, he said, was easier than to render account of an embassy.
“I wish,” said he, “to show you how the thing ought to be done.” As he said this he called for the reading of the decree of the people. When it had been read he said, “This is the decree according to which we were sent out; what stands written here, we did. Now, if you please, take the letter that we have brought from Philip.” When this had been read he said, “You have your answer; it remains for you to deliberate.”
The people shouted, some applauding his forceful brevity, but more of them rebuking his abominable jealousy. Then he went on and said, “See how briefly I will report all the rest. To Aeschines Philip seemed to be eloquent, but not to me; nay, if one should strip off his luck and clothe another with it, this other would be almost his equal.
To Ctesiphon he seemed to be brilliant in person, but to me not superior to Aristodemus the actor” （he was one of us on the embassy）. “One man says he has a great memory; so have others. ‘He was a wonderful drinker’; our Philocrates could beat him. One says that it was left to me to speak about our claim to Amphipolis; but neither to you nor to me would this orator be capable of yielding a moment of his time.
all this talk of theirs,” said he, “is sheer nonsense. But for my part, I am going to move that safe conduct be granted both for the herald who has come from Philip, and for the ambassadors who are to come here from him; also I shall move that on the arrival of the ambassadors the prytanes call a meeting of the assembly for two successive days to consider not only the question of peace, but the question of an alliance also; and finally, that if we, the members of the embassy, are thought to deserve the honor, a vote of thanks be passed, and an invitation be given us to dine tomorrow in the prytaneum.”
is proof of the truth of what I say, take, if you please, the decrees, that you, gentlemen of the jury, may know how crooked he is and how jealous, and how completely he and Philocrates were in partnership in the whole affair; and that you may know his character—how treacherous and faithless. Call also my colleagues in the embassy, if you please, and read their testimony.“Decrees”
Moreover, he not only made these motions, but afterwards he moved in the senate to assign seats in the theatre for the Dionysia to the ambassadors of Philip when they should arrive.21 Read this decree also.“Decree”
Now read also the testimony of my colleagues in the embassy, that you may know, fellow citizens, that when it is a question of speaking in the city's behalf, Demosthenes is helpless, but against those who have broken bread with him and shared in the same libations, he is a practised orator.“Testimony”
You find, therefore, that it was not Philocrates and I who entered into partnership in the negotiations for the peace, but Philocrates and Demosthenes. And I think that the proofs which I have presented to you in confirmation of what I have said, are sufficient. For as to the report we made, you yourselves are my witnesses; but I have presented to you my colleagues in the embassy as witnesses of what was said in Macedonia and of what took place in the course of our journey. But you heard and remember the accusation which Demosthenes made a few moments ago. He began with the speech which I made in the assembly on the question of the peace.
and, utterly untruthful in this part of his accusation, he complained bitterly about the occasion of that speech, saying that it was delivered in the presence of the ambassadors whom the Greeks had sent to you; for you had invited them in order that if you must go on with the war, they might join you against Philip, and that if peace should seem the better policy, they might participate in the peace. Now see the man's deceit in a momentous matter, and his outrageous shamelessness.
For in the public archives you have the record of the dates when you chose the several embassies which you sent out into Hellas, when the war between you and Philip was still in progress, and also the names of the ambassadors; and the men themselves are not in Macedonia, but here in Athens. Now for embassies from foreign states an opportunity to address the assembly of the people is always provided by a decree of the senate. Now he says that the ambassadors from the states of Hellas were present.
Come forward, then, Demosthenes, to this platform while I have the floor, and mention the name of any city of Hellas you choose from which you say the ambassadors had at that time arrived. And give us to read the senatorial decrees concerning them from the records in the senate-house, and call as witnesses the ambassadors whom the Athenians had sent out to the various cities. If they testify that they had returned and were not still abroad at the time when the city was concluding the peace, or if you offer in evidence any audience of theirs before the senate, and the corresponding decrees dated at the time of which you speak, I leave the platform and declare myself deserving of death.
Now read also what is said in the decree of the allies,22 in which it stands expressly written, “Whereas the people of the Athenians are deliberating with regard to peace with Philip, and whereas the ambassadors have not yet returned whom the people sent out into Hellas summoning the cities in behalf of the freedom of the Hellenic states, be it decreed by the allies that as soon as the ambassadors return and make their report to the Athenians and their allies the prytanes shall call two meetings of the assembly of the people according to law, and that in these meetings the Athenians shall deliberate on the question of peace; and whatever the people shall decide, be it voted that this decision stand as the common vote of the allies.” Now please read the decree of the synod.“Decree of the Synod”
Now in contrast with this, read, if you please, the decree moved by Demosthenes, in which he orders the prytanes, after the celebration of the City Dionysia and the session of the assembly in the precinct of Dionysus,23 to call two meetings of the assembly, the one on the eighteenth, the other on the nineteenth; for in thus fixing the dates, he saw to it that the meetings of your assembly should be held before the ambassadors from the states of Hellas should have arrived. Moreover, the decree of the allies, which I acknowledge I also supported, prescribes that you deliberate concerning peace—nothing more; but Demosthenes prescribes the subject of an alliance also. Read them the decree.“Decree”
You have heard both decrees; by them Demosthenes is convicted of saying that the ambassadors were here, when they were still abroad, and of having made void the decree of the allies, when you wished to comply with it. For it was their judgment that we should wait for the ambassadors from the other states of Hellas but Demosthenes is responsible for having prevented your waiting for them, not only by his words, most shamelessly shifty of all men, but by his act and his decree, in which he required us to make our decision immediately.
But he has said that at the first of the two meetings of the assembly, after Philocrates had spoken, I then arose and found fault with the resolution for peace which he had introduced, calling it disgraceful and unworthy of the city; but that again on the next day I spoke in support of Philocrates, and succeeded in sweeping the assembly off its feet, persuading you to pay no attention to those who talked of our fathers' battles and trophies, and not to aid the Greeks.
But that what he has laid to my charge is not only false, but a thing that could not have happened, he himself shall furnish one proof, a witness against himself; another proof all the Athenians shall furnish, and your own memory; a third, the incredibility of the charge; and the fourth, a man of repute, who is active in public affairs, Amyntor, to whom Demosthenes exhibited the draft of a decree, asking him whether he should advise him to hand it to the clerk, a decree not contrary in its provisions to that of Philocrates, but identical with it.
Now, if you please, take and read the decree of Demosthenes,24 in which you will see that he has prescribed that in the first of the two meetings of the assembly all who wish shall take part in the discussion, but that on the next day the presiding officers shall put the question to vote, without giving opportunity for debate—the day on which he asserts that I supported Philocrates in the discussion.“Decree”
You see that the decrees stand as they were originally written, whereas the words of rascals are spoken to fit the day and the occasion. My accuser makes two speeches out of my plea before the assembly, but the decree and the truth make it one. For if the presiding officers gave no opportunity for discussion in the second meeting, it is impossible that I spoke then. And if my policy was the same as that of Philocrates, what motive could I have had for opposing on the first day, and then after an interval of a single night, in the presence of the same listeners, for supporting? Did I expect to gain honor for myself, or did I hope to help Philocrates? I could have done neither, but would have got myself hated by all, and could have accomplished nothing.
But please call Amyntor of the deme Herchia and read his testimony. First, however, I wish to go over its contents with you: Amyntor in support of Aeschines testifies that when the people were deliberating on the subject of the alliance with Philip, according to the decree of Demosthenes, in the second meeting of the assembly, when no opportunity was given to address the people, but when the decrees concerning the peace and alliance were being put to vote,
At that meeting Demosthenes was sitting by the side of the witness, and showed him a decree, over which the name of Demosthenes stood written; and that he consulted him as to whether he should hand it to the presiding officers to put to vote; this decree contained the terms on which Demosthenes moved that peace and alliance he made, and these terms were identical with the terms which Philocrates had moved. Now, if you please, call Amyntor of the deme Herchia; if he does not come hither voluntarily, serve summons upon him.“Testimony”
You have heard the testimony, fellow citizens. Consider whether you conclude that it is I whom Demosthenes has accused, or whether on the contrary he has accused himself in my name. But since he also misrepresents the speech that I made, and puts a false construction on what was said, I have no disposition to run away, or to deny a word that was then spoken; I am not ashamed of what I said; on the contrary, I am proud of it.
But I wish also to recall to you the time and circumstances of your deliberations. We went to war in the first place over the question of Amphipolis. In the course of the war our general succeeded in losing seventy-five allied cities,25 which Timotheus, the son of Conon, had won over and made members of the synod—I am determined, as you see, to speak right out, and to seek safety in frank and truthful speaking; if you are otherwise minded, do what you will with me; I cannot prevaricate—
and a hundred and fifty triremes which he took from the dockyards he failed to bring back, a story which the accusers of Chares are never tired of telling you in the courts; and he spent fifteen hundred talents, not upon his troops, hut upon his tricky officers, a Deiares, a Deipyrus, a Polyphontes, vagabonds collected from all Hellas （to say nothing of the wages of his hirelings on the bema and in the popular assembly）, who were exacting from the wretched islanders a contribution of sixty talents a year, and seizing merchant ships and Greek citizens on the high seas.
and instead of respect and the hegemony of Hellas, Athens had a name that stank like a nest of Myonnesian26 pirates. And Philip from his base in Macedonia was no longer contending with us for Amphipolis, but already for Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, our own possessions, while our citizens were abandoning the Chersonese, the undisputed property of Athens. And the special meetings of the assembly which you were forced to hold, in fear and tumult, were more in number than the regular meetings.
The situation was so precarious and dangerous that Cephisophon of Paeania, one of the friends and companions of Chares, was compelled to make the motion that Antiochus, who commanded the dispatch boats, should sail immediately and hunt up the general who had been put in charge of our forces, and in case he should happen to find him anywhere, should tell him that the people of Athens were astonished to learn that Philip was on the way to the Chersonese, Athenian territory, while as to the general and the force which they themselves had sent out, the Athenians did not even know what had become of them. To prove that I am speaking the truth, hear the decree and recall the facts of the war, and then charge the peace, not to the ambassadors, but to the commanders of our arms.“Decree”
Such was the situation of the city, such the circumstances under which the debate on the peace took place. But the popular speakers arose and with one consent ignored the question of the safety of the state, but called on you to gaze at the Propylaea of the Acropolis, and remember the battle of , Salamis, and the tombs and trophies of our forefathers.
I replied that we must indeed remember all these, but must imitate the wisdom of our forefathers, and beware of their mistakes and their unseasonable jealousies; I urged that we should emulate the battle that we fought at Plataea, the struggles off the shores of Salamis, the battles of Marathon and Artemisium, and the generalship of Tolmides, who with a thousand picked men of the Athenians fearlessly marched straight through the Peloponnesus, the enemy's country.
But I urged that we should take warning from the Sicilian expedition, which was sent out to help the people of Leontini, at a time when the enemy were already in our own territory and Deceleia was fortified against us; and that final act of folly, when, outmatched in the war, and offered terms of peace by the Lacedaemonians, with the agreement that we should hold not only Attica, but Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros also, and retain the constitutional democracy, the people would have none of it, but chose to go on with a war that was beyond their powers. And Cleophon, the lyre-maker, whom many remembered as a slave in fetters, who had dishonourably and fraudulently got himself enrolled as a citizen, and had corrupted the people by distribution of money,27 threatened to take his knife and slit the throat of any man who should make mention of peace.
Finally they brought the city to such a pass that she was glad to make peace, giving up everything, tearing down her walls, receiving a garrison and a Lacedaemonian governor, and surrendering the democracy to the Thirty, who put fifteen hundred citizens to death without a trial. I admit that I urged that we should guard against such folly as that, and imitate the conduct shortly before described. For it was from no stranger that I heard that story, but from him who is nearest of all men to me.
for Atrometus our father, whom you slander, though you do not know him and never saw what a man he was in his prime—you, Demosthenes, a descendant through your mother of the nomad Scythians—our father went into exile in the time of the Thirty, and later helped to restore the democracy; while our mother's brother, our uncle Cleobulus, the son of Glaucus of the deme Acharnae, was with Demaenetus of the family of the Buzygae, when he won the naval victory over Cheilon the Lacedaemonian admiral. The sufferings of the city were therefore a household word with us, familiar to my ears.
But you find fault with my service as ambassador to Arcadia and my speech before the Ten Thousand28 there, and you say that I have changed sides—yourself more slave than freeman, all but branded as a runaway! So long as the war lasted, I tried so far as in me lay to unite the Arcadians and the rest of Hellas against Philip. But when no man came to the help of our city, but some were waiting to see what was going to happen, and others were taking the field against us, while the politicians in our own city were using the war to subsidize the extravagance of their daily life,29 I acknowledge that I advised the people to come to terms with Philip, and to make the peace, which you, Demosthenes, now hold disgraceful, you who never had a weapon of war in your hands—but which I declare to be much more honourable than the war.
You ought, fellow citizens, to judge your ambassadors in the light of the crisis in which they served your generals, in the light of the forces which they commanded. For you set up your statues and you give your seats of honour and your crowns and your dinners in the Prytaneum, not to those who have brought you tidings of peace, but to those who have been victorious in battle. But if the responsibility for the wars is to he laid upon the ambassadors, while the generals are to receive the rewards, the wars you wage will know neither truce nor herald of peace, for no man will be willing to be your ambassador.
Now it remains for me to speak of Cersobleptes and the Phocians, as well as the other matters in which I have been slandered. For, fellow citizens, both on the first and on the second embassy I reported to you what I saw, as I saw it; what I heard, as I heard it. What was it then in either case: what was it that I saw and what was it that I heard about Cersobleptes? I, as well as all my colleagues in the embassy, saw the son of Cersobleptes a hostage at Philip's court; and this is still the case.
now it happened on the occasion of our first embassy, that at the moment when I was leaving for home with the rest of the ambassadors, Philip was setting out for Thrace; but we had his promise that while you were deliberating concerning peace, he would not set foot on the Chersonese with an armed force. Now on that day when you voted the peace, no mention was made of Cersobleptes. But after we had already been elected to receive the oaths,30 before we had set forth on the second embassy, an assembly was held, the presidency of which fell by lot to Demosthenes,31 who is now accusing me.
in that assembly Critobulus of Lampsacus came forward and said that Cersobleptes had sent him, and he demanded that he should be allowed to give his oath to the ambassadors of Philip, and that Cersobleptes be enrolled among your allies.32 When he had thus spoken, Aleximachus of the deme Pelex handed to the presiding officers a motion to be read, in which it was written that the representative of Cersobleptes be permitted to join the other allies in giving the oath to Philip.
When the motion had been read—I think you all remember this—Demosthenes arose from among the presiding officers and refused to put the motion to vote, saying that he would not bring to naught the peace with Philip, and that he did not recognize the sort of allies who joined only in time, as it were, to help in pouring the peace libations; for they had had their opportunity at an earlier session of the assembly. But you shouted and called the board of presidents to the platform, and so against his will the motion was put to vote.
To prove that I am speaking the truth, please call Aleximachus, the author of the motion, and the men who served with Demosthenes on the board of presidents, and read their testimony.“Testimony”
You see, therefore, that Demosthenes, who just now burst into tears here at mention of Cersobleptes, tried to shut him out of the alliance. Now on the adjournment of that session of the assembly, Philip's ambassadors proceeded to administer the oaths to your allies in your army-building.
and my accuser has dared to tell you that it was I who drove Critobulus, Cersobleptes' ambassador, from the ceremony—in the presence of the allies, under the eyes of the generals, after the people had voted as they did! Where did I get all that power? How could the thing have been hushed tip? If I had really dared to undertake such a thing, would you have suffered it, Demosthenes? Would you not have filled the market-place with your shouts and screams, if you had seen me, as you just now said you did, thrusting the ambassador away from the ceremony? But please let the herald call the generals and the representatives of the allies, and do you hear their testimony.“Testimony”
Is it not, therefore, an outrage, gentlemen, if one dares utter such lies about a man who is his own—no, I hasten to correct myself, not his own, but your—fellow citizen, when he is in peril of his life? Wisely, indeed, did our fathers prescribe that, in the trials for bloodshed which are held at the Palladion,33 the one who wins his case must cut in pieces the sacrificial flesh, and take a solemn oath （and the custom of your fathers is in force to this day）, affirming that those jurors who have voted on his side have voted what is true and right, and that he himself has spoken no falsehood; and he calls down destruction upon himself and his household, if this be not true, and prays for many blessings for the jurors. A right provision, fellow citizens, and worthy of a democracy.
For if no one of you would willingly defile himself with justifiable bloodshed, surely he would guard against that which was unjustifiable, such as robbing a man of life or property or civil rights—such acts as have caused some men to kill themselves, others to be put to death by decree of the state. Will you then, fellow citizens, pardon me, if I call him a lewd rascal, unclean of body, even to the place whence his voice issues forth, and if I go on to prove that the rest of his accusation about Cersobleptes is false on the face of it?
You have a practice which in my judgment is most excellent and most useful to those in your midst who are the victims of slander: you preserve for all time in the public archives your decrees, together with their dates and the names of the officials who put them to vote. Now this man has told you that what ruined the cause of Cersobleptes was this: that when Demosthenes urged that we should go to Thrace, where Cersobleptes was being besieged, and should solemnly call on Philip to cease doing this thing, I, as leader of the ambassadors and influential with you, refused, and sat down in Oreus, I and the rest of the ambassadors, busy with getting foreign consulships for ourselves.34
Hear now the letter which Chares sent to the people at the time, saying that Cersobleptes had lost his kingdom and that Philip had taken Hieron Oros35 on the twenty-fourth of Elaphebolion. And it was Demosthenes, one of the ambassadors, who was presiding in the assembly here on the twenty-fifth of that month.“Letter”
Now not only did we delay all the rest of that month, but it was Munichion36 when we set out. As witness of this I will present the senate, for there is a decree of theirs which commands the ambassadors to set out in order to receive the oaths. Please read the decree of the senate.“Decree”
Now read also the date of the decree.“Date”
You hear that the decree was passed on the third of Munichion. How many days before I set out was it that Cersobleptes lost his kingdom? According to Chares the general it occurred the month before—that is, if Elaphebolion is the month next before Munichion! Was it, then, in my power to save Cersobleptes, who was lost before I set out from home? And now do you imagine that there is one word of truth in his account of what was done in Macedonia or of what was done in Thessaly, when he gives the lie to the senate-house and the public archives, and falsifies the date and the meetings of the assembly?
and is it true, Demosthenes, that you at Athens tried to exclude Cersobleptes from the treaty, but pitied him when you got to Oreus? And do you today accuse me of having taken bribes, you who were once fined by the Senate of the Areopagus for not prosecuting your suit for assault, that time when you indicted your cousin Demomeles of Paeania for the cut on your head that you gave yourself with your own hand?37 And do you put on airs before these jurymen, as though they did not know that you are the bastard son of Demosthenes the cutler?38
But you undertook to say that I at first refused to serve on the embassy to the Amphictyons,39 and later went on the embassy and was guilty of misconduct, and you read the one decree and suppressed the other.40 I was, indeed, chosen one of the ambassadors to the Amphictyons, and even as I had shown myself zealous in reporting to you the embassy from which I had returned, so now, although I was in poor health, I did not refuse the new mission, but promised to serve, if I should have the strength. But as the ambassadors were on the point of setting out, I sent my brother and his son with my physician to the senate, not to decline service for me
(for the law does not permit men who have been elected by the assembly to decline before the senate), but merely to testify to my illness.
When now the ambassadors had been informed of the fate of the Phocians, they returned, and a meeting of the assembly was held. I had by this time recovered and was present. When the people insisted that we who had been originally elected should all go on with the embassy in spite of what had happened, I thought it my duty to speak the truth to the Athenians.41
and when I rendered account of my service on that embassy, you, Demosthenes, preferred no charge, but you proceed against my conduct on this embassy, the embassy that was appointed to receive the oaths. As to this I will make a clear and just defence. For it serves you, as it does all liars, to confuse the dates, but it serves me to give the events in their order, beginning with our journey to receive the oaths.42
In the first place, of the ten ambassadors （or rather eleven, counting the representative of the allies, who was with us） not one was willing to mess with Demosthenes, when we set out on the second embassy, nor even to lodge at the same inn with him as we journeyed, whenever it could be avoided, for they had seen how he had plotted against them all on the previous embassy.
Now not a word was said about making the journey along the Thracian coast;43 for the decree did not prescribe any such journey, but simply that we should receive the oaths and transact certain other business, nor could we have accomplished anything if we had gone, for Cersobleptes' fate had already been decided, as you heard a moment ago; for there is not a word of truth in what he has said, but, at a loss for any true charge, he resorts to these prodigious lies.
On the journey two attendants followed him, carrying sacks of bedding; in one of the sacks, he assured us, was a talent of silver; so that his colleagues were reminded of those old nicknames of his; for the boys used to call him “Batalos,” he was so vulgar and obscene then when he was growing out of boyhood and was bringing against his guardians big lawsuits of ten talents each, he was called “Argas”;44 now, grown to manhood, he has got also the name that we apply to rascals in general, “Blackmailer.”
and he was going with the intention of ransoming the captives,45 as he said, and as he has just now told you, although he knew that at no time during the war had Philip exacted ransom-money for any Athenian, and although he had heard all Philip's friends say that he would release the rest also, if peace should be made. And he was carrying one talent for many unfortunates—sufficient ransom for one man, and not a very well to-do man at that!
But when we reached Macedonia and found Philip returned from Thrace, we held a meeting;46 the decree under which we were acting was read, and we went over the instructions that had been given us in addition to the business of receiving the oaths. But finding that no one mentioned the subjects that were most important, and all were dwelling on minor matters, I spoke words which I must repeat to you.
and in heaven's name, gentlemen, even as you allowed my accuser to speak as he himself chose, pray so continue to listen quietly to the defence also, in the same manner in which from the beginning you have listened during all my speech thus far. Well, as I just now intimated, fellow citizens, at the meeting of the ambassadors I said that it seemed to me that we were strangely ignoring the most important matter that the people had entrusted to us.
“The reception of the oaths, the discussion of the other questions, and the talk about the prisoners, all that sort of thing could have been done, I think, if the city had entrusted it to some of its petty servants and sent them. But to reach a right solution of the supreme question, so far as that is in our power or Philip's,47 this is now a task for wise ambassadors. I mean,” said I, “the question of the expedition to Thermopylae, which you see in course of preparation. That I am not wide of the mark in this matter, I will show you by weighty considerations.
For ambassadors from Thebes are here, ambassadors from Lacedaemonia have arrived, and here are we with a decree of the people in which it stands written, ‘The ambassadors shall also negotiate concerning any other good thing that may be within their power.’ All Hellas is watching to see what is going to happen. If now our people had thought it wise to speak out plainly to Philip, bidding him strip the Thebans of their insolence, and rebuild the walls of the Boeotian towns,48 they would have asked this of him in the decree. But as it is, by the obscurity of their language they left open a way of retreat for themselves, in case they should fail to persuade him, and they thought best to take the risk its our persons.
Men, therefore, who are ambitious to serve the state must not assume the function of other ambassadors whom the Athenians could have sent instead of us, and at the same time, on their own initiative, try to avoid stirring up the hostility of the Thebans. Epameinondas was a Theban, and he did not cower before the fame of the Athenians, but spoke right out in the Theban assembly, saying that they must remove the propylaea of the Acropolis of Athens and set it up at the entrance to the Cadmeia.”
As I was in the midst of these words, Demosthenes protested with a loud voice, as all our colleagues know, for on top of all his other crimes he is for the Boeotians. At any rate words like these came from him: “This fellow is full of quarrelsomeness and rashness. For myself, I confess that I am timid, that I fear danger from afar, but I protest against embroiling the cities one with another; I hold it to be the wise course that we ambassadors refrain from meddlesome conduct.
Philip is setting out for Thermopylae; I cover my eyes. No man is going to call me to account for the wars of Philip, but for what I say that I ought not to say, or what I do that I was not instructed to do.” The upshot of the matter was that the ambassadors, when asked for their opinion man by man, voted that each of us should say what he thought was to our interests. To show that I speak the truth, please call my colleagues and read their testimony.“Testimony”
Accordingly, fellow citizens, when the ambassadors were assembled at Pella, and Philip had arrived, and the herald called the ambassadors of the Athenians, we came forward, not in the order of age, as in the former embassy—a procedure which found favour with some, and which seemed to be in accord with the orderly way of our city49—but in the way that was dictated by the effrontery of Demosthenes. For he said that he was the youngest of all, but declared that he could not yield the position of first speaker, and would not permit a certain person—hinting at me—to take possession of Philip's ears and leave the rest no chance to speak.
He began his speech with certain slanderous allusions to his colleagues, to the effect that not all of us had come with the same end in view, nor were we all of one mind; and then he proceeded to review his own previous services to Philip: first, his defence of Philocrates' motion, when Philocrates, having moved that Philip be permitted to send ambassadors to the Athenians to discuss peace, was defendant on the charge of having made an unconstitutional proposal; secondly, he read the motion of which Demosthenes himself was author, to grant safe conduct to the herald and ambassadors from Philip; and thirdly, the motion that restricted the people's discussion of peace to appointed days.
To the account he added a conclusion like this: that he had been the first to put a curb on those who were trying to block the peace; that he had done this, not by his words, but by fixing the dates. Then he brought up another motion, the one which provided that the people should discuss an alliance also; then, after that, the motion about assigning the front seats at the Dionysia to Philip's ambassadors.
He alluded also to the special attention he had shown them: the placing of cushions, and certain watchings and vigils of the night, caused by men who were jealous of him and wished to bring insult upon his honourable name! And that utterly absurd story, whereat his colleagues covered their faces for shame, how he gave a dinner to the ambassadors of Philip; and how when they set out for home he hired for them some teams of mules, and escorted them on horseback. For he did not hide in the dark, as certain others do, but made an exhibition of his fawning conduct.
And finally he carefully corrected those other statements:50“I did not say that you are beautiful, for a woman is the most beautiful of all beings; nor that you are a wonderful drinker, for that is a compliment for a sponge, in my opinion; nor that you have a remarkable memory, for I think such praise belongs to the professional sophist.” But not to prolong the story, he said such things in the presence of the ambassadors from almost the whole of Hellas, that laughter arose such as you seldom hear.
But when at last he stopped and there was silence, I was forced to speak—after such an exhibition of ill-breeding and such excess of shameful flattery. Necessarily, by way of preface, I made a brief reply to his insinuations against his colleagues, saying that the Athenians had sent us as ambassadors, not to offer apologies in Macedonia for ourselves, but as men adjudged by our life at home to be worthy of our city.
Then after speaking briefly on the subject of the oaths for which we had come, I reviewed the other matters that you had entrusted to us. For the eminent Demosthenes, for all his exceeding eloquence, had not mentioned a single essential point. And in particular I spoke about the expedition to Thermopylae, and about the holy places, and Delphi, and the Amphictyons. I called on Philip to settle matters there, preferably not with arms, but with vote and verdict; but if that should be impossible （it was already evident that it was, for the army was collected and on the spot）, I said that he who was on the point of deciding the fate of the holy places of our nation ought to give careful thought to the question of piety, and to give attention to those who undertook to give instruction as to our traditions.
At the same time I reviewed from the beginning the story of the founding of the shrine, and of the first synod of the Amphictyons that was ever held; and I read their oaths, in which the men of ancient times swore that they would raze no city of the Amphictyonic states, nor shut them off from flowing water either in war or in peace; that if anyone should violate this oath, they would march against such an one and raze his cities;51 and if any one should violate the shrine of the god or be accessory to such violation, or make any plot against the holy places, they would punish him with hand and foot and voice, and all their power. To the oath was added a mighty curse.
When I had read all this, I solemnly declared that in my opinion it was not right that we should overlook the fact that the cities in Boeotia were lying in ruins.52 To prove that they were Amphictyonic cities and thus protected by the oaths, I enumerated twelve tribes which shared the shrine: the Thessalians, Boeotians （not the Thebans only）, Dorians, Ionians, Perrhaebi, Magnetes, Dolopians, Locrians, Oetaeans, Phthiotians, Malians, and Phocians. And I showed that each of these tribes has an equal vote, the greatest equal to the least: that the delegate from Dorion and Cytinion has equal authority with the Lacedaemonian delegates, for each tribe casts two votes; again, that of the Ionian delegates those from Eretria and Priene have equal authority with those from Athens and the rest in the same way.
Now I showed that the motive of this expedition was righteous and just; but I said that the Amphictyonic Council ought to be convened at the temple, receiving protection and freedom to vote,53 and that those individuals who were originally responsible for the seizure of the shrine ought to be punished—not their cities, but the individuals who had plotted and carried out the deed; and that those cities which surrendered the wrongdoers for trial ought to be held guiltless. “But if you take the field and with your forces confirm the wrongdoing of the Thebans,54 you will receive no gratitude from those whom you help, for you could not possibly do them so great a service as the Athenians once did, and they have no memory for that; while you will be wronging those whom you leave in the lurch, and will find them, not your friends in the future, but all the more your enemies.”
But not to waste time in reciting to you now precisely what was spoken there, I will content myself with this brief summary of it all. Fortune and Philip were masters of the issue, but I, of loyalty to you and of the words spoken. My words were words of justice, and they were spoken in your interest; the issue was not according to our prayer, but according to Philip's acts. Who, therefore, is it that deserves your approval? Is it the man who showed no desire to do any good thing whatever, or the man who left undone nothing that was in his power? But I now pass over many things for lack of time.
He said that I deceived you by saying that within a few days Thebes would be humbled; and that I told about the Euboeans, how I had frightened them, and that I led you on into empty hopes. But, fellow citizens, let me tell you what it is that he is doing. While I was with Philip I demanded—and when I returned to you I reported that I thought it right—that Thebes should be Boeotian, and not Boeotia, Theban. He asserts, not that I reported this, but that I promised it.
And I told you that Cleochares of Chalcis said that he was surprised at the sudden agreement between you and Philip, especially when we had been instructed “to negotiate concerning any good thing that should be within our power.” For he said the people of the small states, like himself, were afraid of the secret diplomacy of the greater. Demosthenes asserts, not that I related this fact, but that I promised to hand over Euboea! But I had supposed that when the city was about to deliberate on matters of supreme importance, no statement from any Hellenic source ought to be ignored.
But he falsely declared that when he wished to report the truth, he was hindered by me, together with Philocrates—for he divided the responsibility in that case also. Now I should like to ask you this: Has any ambassador sent out from Athens ever been prevented from presenting to the people an official report of his conduct? And if one had suffered such treatment and had been repudiated by his colleagues, would he ever have made a motion that they be given a vote of thanks and invited to dinner? But Demosthenes on his return from the second embassy, in which he says that the cause of Hellas was ruined, moved the vote of thanks in his decree;
and not only that, but when I had reported to the people what I had said about the Amphictyons and Boeotians, not briefly and rapidly as now, but as nearly word for word as possible, and when the people heartily applauded, I called upon him together with the other ambassadors, and asked them whether my report was true, and identical with what I had said to Philip; and when all my colleagues had testified and praised me, after them all Demosthenes arose and said: No, I had not to-day been speaking as I spoke there, but that I spoke twice as well there. You who are going to give the verdict are my witnesses of this.
and yet what better opportunity could he have had to convict me than to do it then and there, if I was in any wise deceiving the city? You say, Demosthenes, that while I was in a conspiracy against the city in the first embassy, you were not aware of it, but that on the second you found it out—the embassy in which we find you testifying to my services! And while accusing me for my conduct on the first embassy, you at the same time deny that you accuse me, and direct your accusations against the embassy that was sent to take the oaths. And yet if it is the peace you find fault with, it was you who moved to add the alliance to it. And if Philip did at any point deceive the city, his deception had to do with the peace, for he was maneuvering for the precise form of peace that would serve his own advantage. But it was the earlier embassy that offered the opportunity to accomplish this; the second took place after the thing was already done.
How he has deceived you—deceit is ever the mark of the charlatan—see from his own words. He says that I went down the Loedias river to Philip in a canoe by night, and that I wrote for Philip the letter which came to you. For Leosthenes, who had been exiled from Athens through the work of blackmailers, was not competent to write a clever letter—a man whom some do not hesitate to rank next to Callistratus of Aphidna as an able orator!
and Philip himself was not competent, against whom Demosthenes was not able to hold his own when he tried to speak in your behalf! nor Python of Byzantium, a man who takes pride in his ability as a writer! but, as it seems, the thing required my help too! And you say that time and again I had private interviews with Philip in the daytime, but you accuse me of paddling down the river in the night—the need of a midnight letter was so urgent!
But there is no truth in your story, as those who messed with me have come to testify—Aglaocreon of Tenedos and latrocles the son of Pasiphon, with whom I slept every night during the whole time, from beginning to end; they know that I was never away from them a single night, nor any part of a night. We present also our slaves and offer them for torture;55 and I offer to interrupt my speech if the prosecution agree. The officer shall come in and administer the torture in your presence, gentlemen of the jury, if you so order. There is still time enough to do it, for in the apportionment of the day eleven jars of water have been assigned to my defence.56
If the slaves testify that I ever slept away from these messmates of mine, spare me not, fellow citizens, but rise up and kill me. But if you, Demosthenes, shall be convicted of lying, let this be your penalty—to confess in this presence that you are a hermaphrodite, and no free man. Please summon the slaves to the platform here, and read the testimony of my colleagues.“Testimony”“Challenge”
Since now he does not accept the challenge, saying that he would not rest his case on the testimony of tortured slaves, please take this letter, which Philip sent. For a letter that kept us busy writing all night long must obviously be full of clever deception of the city.“Letter”
You hear, gentlemen, what he wrote: “I gave my oath to your ambassadors and he has written the names of those of his allies who were present, both the names of the representatives themselves and of their states; and he says he will send to you those of his allies who were not there in time. Does it seem to you that it would have been beyond Philip's ability to write that in the daytime, and without my help?
But, by heaven, the only thing, apparently, that this man Demosthenes cares about, is to win applause while he is on the platform but whether or not a little later he will be considered the greatest scoundrel in Hellas, for that he appears to care not a whit. For how could one put any faith in a man who has undertaken to maintain that it was not Philip's generalship, but my speeches, that enabled Philip to get this side Thermopylae! And he gave you a sort of reckoning and enumeration of the days during which, while I was making my report on the embassy, the couriers of Phalaecus, the Phocian tyrant, were reporting to him how matters stood in Athens, while the Phocians, putting their trust in me, admitted Philip this side Thermopylae, and surrendered their own cities to him.
Now all this is the invention of my accuser. It was fortune, first of all, that ruined the Phocians, and she is mistress of all things; and secondly, it was the long continuance of the ten years' war. For the same thing that built up the power of the tyrants in Phocis, destroyed it also: they established themselves in power by daring to lay hands on the treasures of the shrine, and by the use of mercenaries they put down the free governments; and it was lack of funds that caused their overthrow, when they had spent all their resources on these mercenaries.
the third cause of their ruin was mutiny, such as usually attends armies which are poorly supplied with funds. The fourth cause was Phalaecus' inability to foresee the future. For it was plain that the Thessalians and Philip were going to take the field; and shortly before the peace with you was concluded, ambassadors came to you from the Phocians, urging you to help them, and offering to hand over to you Alponus, Thronion, and Nicaea, the posts which controlled the roads to Thermopylae.
But when you had passed a decree that the Phocians should hand over these posts to your general Proxenus, and that you should man fifty triremes, and that all citizens up to the age of forty years should take part in the expedition, then instead of surrendering the Posts to Proxenus, the tyrants arrested those ambassadors of their own who had offered to hand over the garrison posts to you and when your heralds carried the proclamation of the sacred truce of the Mysteries,57 the Phocians alone in all Hellas refused to recognize the truce. Again, when Archidamus the Laconian was ready to take over those posts and guard them, the Phocians refused his offer, answering him that it was the danger from Sparta that they feared, not the danger at home.
That was before you had come to terms with Philip; but on the very day when you were discussing the question of the peace, the letter of Proxenus was read to you, in which he said that the Phocians had failed to hand over the posts to him; and on the same day the heralds of the Mysteries reported to you that the Phocians alone in all Hellas had refused the sacred truce, and had, furthermore, arrested the ambassadors who had been here. To prove that I am speaking the truth, please call the heralds of the truce, and the envoys Callicrates and Metagenes, whom Proxenus our general sent to the Phocians, and let the letter of Proxenus be read.“Testimony”“Letter”
The dates, fellow citizens, taken from the public archives, have been read and compared in your hearing, and you have heard the witnesses, who further testify that before I was elected ambassador, Phalaecus the Phocian tyrant distrusted us and the Lacedaemonians as well, but put his trust in Philip.
But was Phalaecus the only one who failed to discern what the outcome was going to be? How stood public opinion here? Were you not yourselves all expecting that Philip was going to humble the Thebans, when he saw their audacity, and because he was unwilling to increase the power of men whom he could not trust? And did not the Lacedaemonians take part with us in the negotiations against the Thebans, and did they not finally come into open collision with them in Macedonia and threaten them? Were not the Theban ambassadors themselves perplexed and alarmed? And did not the Thessalians laugh at all the rest and say that the expedition was for their own benefit?
Did not some of' Philip's companions say explicitly to some of us that Philip was going to reestablish the cities in Boeotia? Had not the Thebans already, suspicious of the situation, called out all their reserves and taken the field? And did not Philip, when he saw this, send a letter to you calling upon you to come out with all your forces in defence of the cause of justice? As for those who are now for war, and who call peace cowardice, did they not prevent your going out, in spite of the fact that peace and alliance had been made with Philip? And did they not say that they were afraid he would take your soldiers as hostages?
Was it I, therefore, who prevented the people from imitating our forefathers, or was it you, Demosthenes, and those who were in conspiracy with you against the common good? And was it a safer and more honourable course for the Athenians to take the field at a time when the Phocians were at the height of their madness and at war with Philip, with Alponus and Nicaea in their possession—for Phalaecus had not yet surrendered these posts to the Macedonians—and when those whom we were proposing to aid would not accept the truce for the Mysteries, and when we were leaving the Thebans in our rear: or after Philip had invited us, when we had already received his oaths and had an alliance with him, and when the Thessalians and the other Amphictyons were taking part in the expedition?
Was not the latter opportunity far better than the former? But at this later time, thanks to the combination of cowardice and envy in you, Demosthenes, the Athenians brought in their property from the fields, when I was already absent on the third embassy,58 and appearing before the assembly of the Amphictyons59—that embassy on which you dare to say that I set out without having been elected, although, enemy as you are to me, you have never to this day been willing to prosecute me as having wrongly served on it; and we may safely assume that this is not because you begrudge me bodily pains and penalties.
When, therefore, the Thebans were besieging him with their importunities, and our city was in confusion, thanks to you, and the Athenian hoplites were not with him;60 when the influence of the Thessalians had been added to that of the Thebans, thanks to your shortsightedness and because of the hostility to the Phocians which the Thessalians had inherited from that ancient time when Phocians seized and flogged the Thessalian hostages; and when, before my coming and that of Stephanus, Dercylus, and the rest of the ambassadors, Phalaecus already made terms and departed;
Then the people of Orchomenus were in exceeding fear, and had begged for peace, on condition that their lives should be spared and they be allowed to go forth from Boeotia;61 when the Theban ambassadors were standing by, and when it was plain that Philip was threatened with the hostility of the Thebans and Thessalians: then it was that the cause was lost not from any fault of mine, but thanks to your treachery, Demosthenes, and your hired service to Thebes. Of this I think I can furnish important confirmation from what has actually happened.
For if there were any truth in these assertions of yours, the Boeotian fugitives, for whose expulsion I was responsible, and the Phocian exiles, whose restoration I prevented, would be accusing me now. But as a matter of fact they ignore the misfortunes that have come upon them, and satisfied with my loyalty to them, the Boeotian exiles have held a meeting and chosen men to speak in my behalf; and from the towns of Phocis have come ambassadors whose lives I saved when I was representing you before the Amphictyons on the third embassy; for when the representatives from Oetaea went so far as to say that they ought to cast the grown men over the cliffs, I brought the Phocians into the assembly of the Amphictyons and secured a hearing for them. For Phalaecus had made terms for himself and gone, and those who were guiltless were on the point of being put to death; but I pleaded for them, and their lives were spared.
To prove that I speak the truth, please call Mnason the Phocian and those who have come with him, and call the delegates chosen by the Boeotian exiles. Come up to the platform, Liparus and Pythion, and do me the same service for the saving of my life that I did for you.“Plea of the Boeotians and Phocians”
Would it not, then, be monstrous treatment for me if I should be convicted when my accuser is Demosthenes, the paid servant of Thebes and the wickedest man in Hellas, while my advocates are Phocians and Boeotians?
But he dared to say that I am tripped up by my own words. For he says62 that when I was prosecuting Timarchus I said that his lewdness was a matter of common report, and that Hesiod, a good poet, says, “But Common Report dies never, the voice that tongues of many men do utter. She also is divine.”63 He says that this same god comes now and accuses me, for everybody says, according to him, that I have got money from Philip.
But be assured, fellow citizens, there is the greatest difference between common report and slander. For common report has no affinity with malice, but malice is slander's own sister. I will define each of them specifically: it is a case of common report when the mass of the people, on their own impulse and for no reason that they can give, say that a certain event has taken place; but it is slander when one person, insinuating an accusation in the minds of the people, calumniates a man in all the meetings of the assembly and before the senate. To Common Report we offer public sacrifice, as to a god, but the slanderer we prosecute, in the name of the people, as a scoundrel. Do not, therefore, join together the most honourable and the most shameful things.
At many of his charges I was indeed angry, but most of all when he accused me of being a traitor. For to bring such charges as those was to hold me up to public view as a brute, without natural affection, and chargeable in the past with many other sins. Now of my daily life and conduct I think you are competent judges. But facts that escape the public eye, yet are of greatest importance in the opinion of men of character, I will bring into court as my witnesses—facts very many in number and to my credit in the eyes of the law—in order that seeing them you may know what pledges I left at home when I set out for Macedonia on the embassy.
For you, Demosthenes, fabricated these charges against me, but I will tell my story, as I was taught to do from childhood, truthfully. Yonder is my father, Atrometus; there are few older men among all the citizens, for he is now ninety-four years old. When he was a young man, before the war destroyed his property, he was so fortunate as to be an athlete; banished by the Thirty, he served as a soldier in Asia, and in danger he showed himself a man; by birth he was of the phratry64 that uses the same altars as the Eteobutadae, from whom the priestess of Athena Polias comes; and he helped in the restoration of the democracy, as I said a little while ago.65
It is my good fortune, too, that all the members of my mother's family are free-born citizens; and to-day I see her here before my eyes in anxiety and fear for my safety. And yet, Demosthenes, this mother of mine went out to Corinth an exile, with her husband, and shared the disasters of the democracy; but you, who claim to be a man—that you really are a man I should not venture to say—you were once indicted for desertion, and you saved yourself by buying off the man who indicted you, Nicodemus of Aphidna, whom afterward you helped Aristarchus to destroy;66 wherefore you are polluted, and have no right to be invading the market-place.67
Philochares yonder, our eldest brother, a man not of ignoble pursuits, as you slanderously assert,68 but a frequenter of the gymnasia, a one-time comrade of Iphicrates in the field, and a general now for the past three years, has come to beg you to save me. Our youngest brother, too, Aphobetus yonder, who as ambassador to the king of Persia has served you to the credit of the city, who administered your revenues honestly and well when you called him to the department of the treasury, who has gotten him children lawfully—not by putting his wife in Cnosion's bed, as you, Demosthenes, did yours—he also is here, despite your slanders ;for defamation goes no further than the ears.
But you dared to speak about my wife's family also—so shameless you are and so inherently thankless, you that have neither affection nor respect for Philodemus,69 the father of Philon and Epicrates, the man by whose good offices you were enrolled among the men of your deme, as the elder Paeanians know.70 But I am amazed if you dare slander Philon, and that, too, in the presence of the most reputable men of Athens, who, having come in here to render their verdict for the best interest of the state, are thinkingmore about the lives we have lived than what we say.
Which think you would they pray heaven to give them, ten thousand hoplites like Philon, so fit in body and so sound of heart, or thrice ten thousand lewd weaklings like you? You try to bring into contempt the good breeding of Epicrates, Philon's brother; but who ever saw him behaving in an indecent manner, either by day in the Dionysiac procession, as you assert, or by night? For you certainly could never say that he was unobserved, for he was no stranger.
And I myself, gentlemen, have three children, one daughter and two sons, by the daughter of Philodemus, the sister of Philon and Epicrates; and I have brought them into court with the others for the sake of asking one question and presenting one piece of evidence to the jury. This question I will now put to you; for I ask, fellow citizens, whether you believe that I would have betrayed to Philip, not only my country, my personal friendships, and my rights in the shrines and tombs of my fathers, but also these children, the dearest of mankind to me. Do you believe that I would have held his friendship more precious than the safety of these children? By what lust have you seen me conquered? What unworthy act have I ever done for money? It is not Macedon that makes men good or bad, but their own inborn nature; and we have not come back from the embassy changed men, but the same men that you yourselves sent out.
But in public affairs I have become exceedingly entangled with a cheat and rascal, who not even by accident can speak a truthful word. No: when he is lying, first comes an oath by his shameless eyes, and things that never happened he not only presents as facts, but he even tells the day on which they occurred; and he invents the name of some one who happened to be there, and adds that too, imitating men who speak the truth. But we who are innocent are fortunate in one thing, that he has no intelligence with which to supplement the trickery of his character and his knack of putting words together. For think what a combination of folly and ignorance there must be in the man who could invent such a lie against me as that about the Olynthian woman,71 such a lie that you shut him up in the midst of his speech. For he was slandering a man who is the farthest removed from any such conduct, and that in the presence of men who know.
But see how far back his preparations for this accusation go. For there is a certain Olynthian living here, Aristophanes by name. Demosthenes was introduced to him by some one, and having found out that he is an able speaker, paid extravagant court to him and won his confidence; this accomplished, he tried to persuade him to give false testimony against me before you, promising, namely, to give him five hundred drachmas on the spot, if he would consent to come into court and complain of me, and say that I was guilty of drunken abuse of a woman of his family, who had been taken captive; and he promised to pay him five hundred more when he should have given the testimony.
But Aristophanes answered him, as he himself told the story, that so far as his exile and present need were concerned, Demosthenes' aim had not been wide of the mark—indeed no aim could have been closer—but that he had entirely misjudged his character; for he could do nothing of the sort. I will offer Aristophanes himself to testify to the truth of what I say. Please call Aristophanes the Olynthian, and read his testimony, and call those who heard his story and reported it to me—Dercylus, of the deme Hagnus, the son of Autocles, and Aristeides of Cephisia, the son of Euphiletus.“Testimony”
You hear the sworn testimony. But these wicked arts of rhetoric, which Demosthenes offers to teach our youth, and has now employed against me, his tears and groans for Hellas, and his praise of Satyrus the comic actor, because over the cups he begged of Philip the release of certain friends of his who were captives in chains, digging in Philip's vineyard—you remember, do you not, how after this preface he lifted up that shrill and abominable voice of his and cried out,
“How outrageous that when a man whose business it is to act the parts of a Carion or of a Xanthias72 showed himself so noble and generous, Aeschines, the counsellor of the greatest city, the adviser of the Ten Thousand of Arcadia, did not restrain his insolence, but in drunken heat, when Xenodocus, one of the picked corps of Philip, was entertaining us, seized a captive woman by the hair, and took a strap and flogged her!”
If you had believed him, or Aristophanes had helped him out in his his against me, I should have been destroyed under shameful accusations. Will you therefore harbour longer in your midst guilt that is so fraught with doom to itself—God grant it be not to the city!—and will you, who purify your assembly,73 offer the prayers that are contained in your decrees on motion of this man, as you send your troops out by land or sea? You know the words of Hesiod:
““Ofttimes whole peoples suffer from one man Whose deeds are sinful and whose purpose base.” ” Hes. WD 240
One thing more I wish to add to what I have said: if there is anywhere among mankind any form of wickedness in which I fail to show that Demosthenes is preeminent, let my death be your verdict. But I think many difficulties attend a defendant: his danger calls his mind away from his anger, to the search for such arguments as shall secure his safety, and it causes him earnest thought lest he overlook some one of the accusations which have been brought against him. I therefore invite you, and at the same time myself, to recall the accusations.
Consider, then, one by one, fellow citizens, the possible grounds for my prosecution: what decree have I proposed, what law have I repealed, what law have I kept from being passed, what covenant have I made in the name of the city, what vote as to the peace have I annulled, what have I added to the terms of peace that you did not vote?
The peace failed to please some of our public men. Then ought they not to have opposed it at the time, instead of putting me on trial now? Certain men who were getting rich out of the war from your war-taxes and the revenues of the state, have now been stopped; for peace does not feed laziness. Shall those, then, who are not wronged, but are themselves wronging the city, punish the man who was sponsor for the peace,741 and will you, who are benefited by it, leave in the lurch men who have proved themselves useful to the commonwealth?
Yes, my accuser says, because I joined Philip in singing paeans when the cities of Phocis had been razed.75 What evidence could be sufficient to prove that charge? I was, indeed, invited to receive the ordinary courtesies, as were my colleagues in the embassy. Those who were invited and were present at the banquet, including the ambassadors from other Hellenic states, were not less than two hundred. And so it seems that among all these I was conspicuous, not by my silence, but by joining in the singing—for Demosthenes says so, who was not there himself, and presents no witness from among those who were.
Who would have noticed me, unless I was a sort of precentor and led the chorus? Therefore if I was silent, your charge is false; but if, with our fatherland safe and no harm done to my fellow citizens, I joined the other ambassadors in singing the paean when the god was being magnified and the Athenians in no wise dishonored, I was doing a pious act and no wrong, and I should justly be acquitted. Am I, forsooth, because of this to be considered as a man who knows no pity, but you a saint, you, the accuser of men who have shared your bread and cup?
But you have also reproached me with inconsistency in my political action, in that I have served as ambassador to Philip, when I had previously been summoning the Greeks to oppose him.76 And yet, if you choose, you may bring this charge against the rest of the Athenian people as a body. You, gentlemen, once fought the Lacedaemonians, and then after their misfortune at Leuctra you aided the same people. You once restored Theban exiles to their country, and again you fought against them at Mantineia. You fought against Themison and the Eretrians, and again you saved them. And you have before now treated countless others of the Hellenes in the same way. For in order to attain the highest good the individual, and the state as well, is obliged to change front with changing circumstances.
But what is the good counsellor to do? Is he not to give the state the counsel that is best in view of each present situation? And what shall the rascally accuser say? Is he not to conceal the occasion and condemn the act? And the born traitor—how shall we recognize him? Will he not imitate you, Demosthenes, in his treatment of those whom chance throws in his way and who have trusted him? Will he not take pay for writing speeches for them to deliver in the courts, and then reveal the contents of these speeches to their opponents?77 You wrote a speech for the banker Phormion and were paid for it: this speech you communicated to Apollodorus, who was bringing a capital charge against Phormion.
You entered a happy home, that of Aristarchus the son of Moschus; you ruined it. You received three talents from Aristarchus in trust as he was on the point of going into exile;78 you cheated him out of the money that was to have aided him in his fight, and were not ashamed of the reputation to which you laid claim, that of being a wooer of the young man's bodily charms—an absurd story, of course, for genuine love has no place for rascality. That conduct, and conduct like that, defines the traitor.
But he spoke, I believe, about service in the field, and named me “the fine soldier.” But I think, in view of my present peril rather than of his slander, I may without offence speak of these matters also. For where, or when, or to whom, shall I speak of them, if I led this day go by? As soon as I passed out of boyhood I became one of the frontier guards of this land for two years.79 As witnesses to this statement, I will call my fellow cadets and our officers.
My first experience in the field was in what is called “division service,”80 when I was with the other men of my age and the mercenary troops of Alcibiades, who convoyed the provision train to Phleius. We fell into danger near the place known as the Nemean ravine, and I so fought as to win the praise of my officers.81 I also served on the other expeditions in succession, whether we were called out by age-groups or by divisions.
I fought in the battle of Mantineia, not without honour to myself or credit to the city. I took part in the expeditions to Euboea,82 and at the battle of Tamynae83 as a member of the picked corps I so bore myself in danger that I received a wreath of honour then and there, and another at the hands of the people on my arrival home; for I brought the news of the Athenian victory, and Temenides, taxiarch84 of the tribe Pandionis, who was despatched with me from camp, told here how I had borne myself in the face of the danger that befell us.
But to prove that I am speaking the truth, please take this decree, and call Temenides and those who were my comrades in the expedition in the service of the city, and call Phocion, the general, not yet to plead for me,85 if it please the jury, but as a witness who cannot speak falsely without exposing himself to the libellous attacks of my prosecutor.“Decree”“Testimony”
Since, then, it was I who brought you the first news of the victory of the city and the success of your sons, I ask of you this as my first reward, the saving of my life. For I am not a hater of the democracy, as my accuser asserts, but a hater of wickedness; and I am not one who forbids your “imitating the forefathers” of Demosthenes86—for he has none—but one who calls upon you to emulate those policies which are noble and salutary to the state. Those policies I will now review somewhat more specifically, beginning with early times.
In former days, after the battle of Salamis, our city stood in high repute, and although our walls had been thrown down by the barbarians, yet so long as we had peace with the Lacedaemonians we preserved our democratic form of government.87 But when certain men had stirred up trouble and finally caused us to become involved in war with the Lacedaemonians, then, after we had suffered and inflicted many losses, Miltiades, the son of Cimon, who was proxenus88 of the Lacedaemonians, negotiated with them, and we made a truce for fifty years, and kept it thirteen years.89
During this period we fortified the Peiraeus and built the north wall; we added one hundred new triremes to our fleet; we also equipped three hundred cavalrymen and bought three hundred Scythians;90 and we held the democratic constitution unshaken.
But meanwhile men who were neither free by birth nor of fit character had intruded into our body politic, and finally we became involved in war again with the Lacedaemonians, this time because of the Aeginetans.91
In this war we received no small injury, and became desirous of peace. We therefore sent Andocides and other ambassadors to the Lacedaemonians and negotiated a peace, which we kept for thirty years.92 This peace brought the democracy to the height of its prosperity. For we deposited on the Acropolis a thousand talents of coined money we built one hundred additional triremes, and constructed dockyards; we formed a corps of twelve hundred cavalry and a new force of as many bowmen, and the southern long wall was built; and no man undertook to overthrow the democratic constitution.
But again we were persuaded to go to war, now because of the Megarians.93 Having given up our land to be ravaged, and suffering great privations, we longed for peace, and finally concluded it through Nicias, the son of Niceratus.94 In the period that followed we again deposited treasure in the Acropolis, seven thousand talents, thanks to this peace, and we acquired triremes, seaworthy and fully equipped, no fewer than three hundred in number; a yearly tribute of more than twelve hundred talents came in to us; we held the Chersonese, Naxos, and Euboea, and in these years we sent out a host of colonies.
Though the blessings we were enjoying were so great, we again brought war against the Lacedaemonians, persuaded by the Argives;95 and at last, in consequence of the eagerness of our public men for war, we sank so low as to see a Spartan garrison in our city, and the Four Hundred, and the impious Thirty;96 and it was not the making of peace that caused this,97 but we were forced by orders laid upon us. But when again a moderate government had been established, and the exiled democracy had come back from Phyle,98 with Archinus and Thrasybulus as the leaders of the popular party, we took the solemn oath with one another “to forgive and forget” an act which, in the judgment of all men, won for our state the reputation of the highest wisdom.
The democracy then took on new life and vigour. But now men who have been illegally registered as citizens, constantly attaching to themselves what ever element in the city is corrupt, and following a policy of war after war, in peace ever prophesying danger, and so working on ambitious and over excitable minds, yet when war comes never touching arms themselves, but getting into office as auditors and naval commissioners—men whose mistresses are the mothers of their offspring, and whose slanderous tongues ought to disfranchise them—these men are bringing the state into extreme peril, fostering the name of democracy, not by their character, but by their flatteries, trying to put an end to the peace, wherein lies the safety of the democracy, and in every way fomenting war, the destroyer of popular government.
These are the men who now are making a concerted attack on me; they say that Philip bought the peace, that he overreached us at every point in the articles of agreement, and that the peace which he contrived for his own interests, he himself has violated. And they put me on trial, not as an ambassador, but as a surety for Philip and the peace; the man who had nothing but words under his control they call to account for deeds—deeds that existed only in their own imagination. And the very man whom I exhibit to you as my eulogist in the public decrees, I have found as my accuser in the court-room. And although I was but one of ten ambassadors, I alone am made to give account.
To plead with you in my behalf are present my father, whom I beg of you not to rob of the hopes of his old age; my brothers, who would have no desire for life if I should be torn from them; my connections by marriage; and these little children, who do not yet realize their danger, but are to be pitied if disaster fall on us. For them I beg and beseech you to take earnest thought, and not to give them over into the hands of our enemies, or of a creature who is no man—no better in spirit than a woman.
And first of all I pray and beseech the gods to save me, and then I beseech you, who hold the verdict in your hands, before whom I have defended myself against every one of the accusations, to the best of my recollection; I beg you to save me, and not give me over to the hands of the rhetorician and the Scythian. You who are fathers of children or have younger brother's whom you hold dear, remember that to me they are indebted for a warning which they will not forget, admonished to live chastely through my prosecution of Timarchus.
And all the rest of you, toward whom I have conducted myself without offence, in fortune a plain citizen, a decent man like any one of you, and the only man who in the strife of politics has refused to join in conspiracy against you, upon you I call to save me. With all loyalty I have served the city as her ambassador, alone subjected to the clamour of the slanderers, which before now many a man conspicuously brave in war has not had the courage to face; for it is not death that men dread, but a dishonoured end.
Is he not indeed to be pitied who must look into the sneering face of an enemy, and hear with his ears his insults? But nevertheless I have taken the risk, I have exposed my body to the peril. Among you I grew up, your ways have been my ways. No home of yours is the worse for my pleasures; no man has been deprived of his fatherland by accusation of mine at any revision of the citizen-lists, nor has come into peril when rendering account of his administration of an office.
A word more and I have done. One thing was in my power, fellow citizens: to do you no wrong. But to be free from accusation, that was a thing which depended upon fortune, and fortune cast my lot with a slanderer, a barbarian, who cared not for sacrifices nor libations nor the breaking of bread together; nay, to frighten all who in time to come might oppose him, he has fabricated a false charge against us and come in here. If, therefore, you are willing to save those who have laboured together with you for peace and for your security, the common good will find champions in abundance, ready to face danger in your behalf.
To endorse my plea I now call Eubulus as a representative of the statesmen and all honourable citizens, and Phocion as a representative of the generals, preeminent also among us all as a man of upright character. From among my friends and associates I call Nausicles, and all the others with whom I have associated and whose pursuits I have shared.
My speech is finished. This my body I, and the law, now commit to your hands.
1 Demosthenes in his speech （Dem. 19.196 ff.） had told in detail the story of the abuse of a well-born Olynthian captive by Aeschines and others at a banquet in Macedonia.
2 Neither the comparison with Dionysius nor the story of the dream was retained by Demosthenes when he revised his speech for publication.
3 Shortly before the time for the Olympic festival in each quadrennium, heralds were sent out by the Elean state to carry to all Greeks the invitation to the festival and to proclaim a sacred truce between all warring Greek states. Phrynon claimed that Macedonian pirates had violated this truce.
4 On the indictment for proposing an unconstitutional measure, see Aeschin. 3, Introduction.
5 A prosecutor who failed to receive one-fifth part of the votes of the jury was subject to a fine of 1,000 drachmas and disability to bring such a suit in the future.
6 The same story that the Euboean ambassadors and Ctesiphon had brought, that Philip was ready to discuss peace.
7 The job would be so easy that he would not have to stop to soak the rush fiber and make it pliable. A proverbial expression.
8 Leosthenes was an Athenian orator and general, who had been condemned to death in 361 because of the failure of his campaign in the northern waters; he was now in exile in Macedonia. The recovery of Amphipolis would mollify the anger of the Athenians against him
9 See Dem. 19.189 ff. Aeschines had protested that Demosthenes, in attacking his fellow-ambassadors on their return from Macedonia, was violating the common decencies of life, which demanded that men who had sat at table together should treat one another as friends. Demosthenes replied that the table and the salt, even, in the case of the prytanes and other high officials who ate together at a common official table, gave no immunity to the wrongdoer; his fellow-officials were free to bring him to punishment. If the public table of the prytanes did not protect the guilty from attack by his fellow-officers, the table and the salt of the group of ambassadors should be no protection to Aeschines against Demosthenes' attack.
10 In Aeschin. 3.171 f., Aeschines declares that the maternal grandmother of Demosthenes was a Scythian.
11 The turn of Aeschines and Demosthenes as the youngest of the ambassadors.
12 Amyntas, king of Macedonia, left three sons, Alexander, Perdiccas, and Philip. Alexander succeeded his father, but after a short reign he was assassinated. His mother Eurydice with her paramour Ptolemaeus took the throne. Her power was threatened by Pausanias, a member of a rival princely house.
13 Amyntas, hard pressed by his Illyrian and Thessalian neighbors, had at one time been driven from his throne by a rival prince. After two years he was restored to power by the help of Sparta and Athens. It is conjectured that this was the occasion of his adoption of the Athenian Iphicrates, one of the most capable leaders of mercenary troops.
14 Ennea Hodoi （ “Nine Roads”） was the old name of the place colonized by the Athenians in 436 under the name of Amphipolis.
15 The “Congress of Sparta,” 371 b.c.
16 Amphipolis was founded as a colony of Athens in 436, and became one of the most important cities on the northern coast. The Spartans seized it early in the Peloponnesian war, and held it till the close of the war. They then renounced their claim to it, but the people of the city themselves refused to return to Athenian allegiance. Repeated expeditions were sent out by the Athenians to retake the city, but without success. One of Philip's first acts was to seize Amphipolis. It was claimed at Athens that he had promised, if given a free hand, to restore the place to Athens; but this he refused to do, and so began the first war between Athens and Philip. The Athenian claim to the city was therefore one of the most important matters to be presented by the ambassadors whose mission Aeschines is here describing.
17 We are as ignorant of the particular shades of vulgarity and rascality conveyed by these words as Aeschines says he was before his initiation.
18 A proverbial name for a cheat.
19 Demosthenes dared them to do it; they accepted the challenge and wagered that they would.
20 The hearth of the Prytaneum, the headquarters of the standing committee of the senate, was regarded as the common hearth of the state; a statue of Hestia was in this hall, and in the senate-house was an altar of that goddess.
21 It had been expected that the ambassadors of Philip would arrive in time to take up their business before the Great Dionysia; the delay in their arrival necessitated postponing the business until after the festival, a period of about a week.
22 A decree of the confederate synod, sitting in Athens. The states referred to in the preceding paragraph were outside this Athenian league.
23 A meeting regularly held at the close of the City Dionysia to act on any matters growing out of the conduct of the festival.
24 This is not the draft of a decree just spoken of, but that decree in which Demosthenes had provided for the two meetings of the assembly.
25 Aeschines chooses to speak as though the war with Philip were one and the same with the other, contemporaneous war, in which a large part of the Athenian allies broke off from the naval league.
26 Μυοννήσος, “Mouse-island”, was a little island off the coast of Thessaly, notorious as a nest of pirates.
27 Aristot. Const. Ath. 28 tells us that it was Cleophon who introduced the two obol donation from the treasury to provide a free seat in the theatre for every citizen who applied for it. This was the beginning of the Theorika, recognized in the time of Aeschines as one of the greatest abuses in the democracy.
28 The national assembly of the Arcadians. Aeschines appeared before them in 348 in the attempt to counteract the work of Philip's agents among them.
29 For this use of χορηγόν see the note on Aeschin. 3.240 （χορηγεῖς） of the Speech against Ctesiphon.
30 The same ambassadors who had negotiated the preliminaries of the peace were appointed to go back to Macedonia and receive the ratification of the peace by Philip and his allies.
31 A board of nine senators presided over the meetings of the assembly; one member of the board was chosen by lot as chief presiding officer for the day.
32 The peace that had just been negotiated was to be between Philip and his allies, and Athens and her allies. By the allies of Athens were meant the members of the Athenian naval league, whose synod, sitting at Athens, had ratified in advance whatever action the Athenian people might take as to the peace. Cersobleptes was not a member of this league, but sought to be admitted at the last moment, in order to gain the protection of the peace. Demosthenes, feeling that his admission would endanger the success of the negotiations for peace, attempted to prevent his admission, by insisting on the irregularity of the procedure; Cersobleptes should have presented his credentials to the senate and obtained from them a resolution advising the assembly to hear his plea; and this should have been done at an earlier meeting.
33 This court was for cases of unintentional homicide.
34 Athenian citizens were employed by foreign states to represent their interests at Athens and aid their citizens there. Demosthenes asserted that the ambassadors were intent on getting such appointments for themselves.
35 This was an important post on the Thracian coast, and had been held by an Athenian garrison, in the interest of Cersobleptes.
36 The next month after Elaphebolion.
37 The reference is to a family quarrel which grew out of the suit of the young Demosthenes against his guardian.
38 A bastard in the sense that his mother was of a Scythian family, and so debarred from legitimate Athenian wedlock. See on Aeschin. 2.22.
39 The embassy was strictly to Philip, but as it was to deal largely with Amphictyonic business in the hands of Philip and allies of his who were in control of Amphictyonic affairs, Aeschines can speak of it as “to the Amphictyons.”
40 The reference is to events after the return of the second embassy. After their report was accepted, a third embassy was appointed to go to Philip, extending the peace and alliance to his descendants, and declaring that if the Phocians would not submit to the Amphictyons, the Athenians would take the field against them. Most of the men appointed on this third embassy had served on the other two. Demosthenes was nominated, but he refused to serve. Aeschines was elected, but finally on the plea of illness he was excused by the senate, and his brother was appointed to take his place. The embassy had gone only as far as Euboea when they received the news that the Phocians had surrendered to Philip; they therefore immediately returned to Athens. The Athenians now reappointed the same men, including Aeschines, to go to meet Philip. Aeschines, now recovered in health, went on this fourth embassy. Demosthenes （Dem. 19.126） falsely declares that he went without having been elected. For the whole story from Demosthenes' standpoint, see Dem. 19.121-133. In Dem. 19.172, Demosthenes betrays the fact that there really was a reelection for the fourth embassy, and so confirms Aeschines' statement.
41 That is, Aeschines felt that he ought now to say frankly that his health was such that he could not decline that service.
42 Aeschines returns to the story of the second embassy.
43 The journey which Demosthenes, in the speech for the prosecution, had said ought to have been made in order to forestall Philip's conquests there.
44 “Batalos” has been thought to mean “stammerer,” or perhaps “mamma-baby” （see Aeschin. 1.126 and 131）, but that explanation would hardly fit this passage. We really have no knowledge as to the derivation of the word. “Argas” was the name of a venomous snake.
45 The Athenian citizens who had been captured at the fall of Olynthus, and were now in slavery in Macedonia.
46 This was a private meeting of the Athenian ambassadors to discuss what they should say to Philip at the coming audience.
47 The supreme question of the hour was the settlement of the long continued Phocian war. Whether Phocis was to be defeated and Thebes given a dangerous increase of power depended in large measure on what action Philip and the Athenians should decide to take, either jointly or severally. The Athenians had been unable to persuade Philip's ambassadors to include the Phocians among the states to be protected by the peace, but it was hoped that these ambassadors from Athens would be able to persuade Philip himself to favour Phocis as against Thebes.
48 The small towns of Boeotia which had been subjugated by Thebes, and were now supporting the Phocians in the hope of regaining their independence.
49 The Athenian “way” in such matters is described in Aeschin. 3.2.
50 The statements that his colleagues had made to the assembly on their return from the first embassy, as related in Aeschin. 2.47 and Aeschin. 2.52.
51 The city that has violated its Amphictyonic oath can no longer claim the protection of that oath.
52 See on Aeschin. 2.104.
53 The Council had been unable to meet while the Phocians were holding the shrine. Aeschines would have Philip' s army occupy Delphi, and so restore the Amphictyons to their rights.
54 If Philip should help the Thebans to subdue the Phocians, the confirmation of Theban control over the Boeotian cities would naturally follow, as it did in the event.
55 Slave testimony was accepted in the Athenian courts only when it was given, or offered, under torture.
56 A definite time, measured by the water clock, or clepsydra, was assigned to each side. How long a time would be occupied by the running of one amphora of water through the clepsydra, we have no means of knowing.
57 A provision for the safe conduct of all Greeks, who wished to attend the celebration of the lesser Eleusinian Mysteries, which took place in Attica in the spring.
58 See on Aeschin. 2.94. This was, strictly speaking, the fourth embassy; but as it was appointed to do what had been entrusted to the third, and was made up of the same men, Aeschines speaks of it as the third.
59 The ambassadors to Philip, while not formally accredited to negotiate with the Amphictyonic Council, which Philip had called together to act on the punishment of the Phocians, were present at Delphi during their meeting, and Aeschines addressed the Council. see Aeschin. 2.142.
60 See Aeschin. 2.137.
61 Orchomenus was one of the towns referred to in Aeschin. 2.104.
62 Dem. 19.243 f.
63 Aeschin. 1.129.
64 Each of the four Athenian tribes was divided into three phratries. Under the democracy these groups of families had only religious functions. Each phratry had its own place of worship.
65 See Aeschin. 2.78.
66 In the spring of 348 Demosthenes was serving on an expedition sent out to Euboea. On the approach of the Great Dionysia he was obliged to return to the city to serve as choragus, a burden which he had previously volunteered to take upon himself, at heavy cost. Personal enemies of his brought, but did not prosecute, a charge of desertion in the field.
The murder of Nicodemus by Aristarchus, a young friend of Demosthenes, was a notorious case, but the attempts of Demosthenes' enemies to connect him with it were entirely unsuccessful. See Aeschin. 1.172.
67 A man under indictment for murder was not allowed access to the market-place, for contact with a murderer would pollute innocent men.
68 For Demosthenes' taunts as to the brothers of Aeschines and those of his wife, see his speech Dem. 19.237 and 287.
69 See Aeschin. 2.152.
70 Aeschines insinuates that only by some extraordinary favoritism could Demosthenes, with his strain of Scythian blood, ever have been recognized as an Athenian of pure blood, and so enrolled in the citizen-list when he came to manhood.
71 See Aeschin. 2.4, note.
72 Satyrus, the comic actor, would often take slave parts, for which Carion and Xanthias were among the traditional names.
73 The Athenian assembly was regularly opened with a sacrifice of purification and prayer.
74 Philocrates, the prime mover in the peace had already gone into banishment, afraid to stand trial.
75 Dem. 19.128
76 See Dem. 9.9 ff.
77 Cp. Aeschin. 3.173.
78 The occasion was the murder of Nicodemus by Aristarchus. See Aeschin. 2.148, note.
79 the young Athenian citizen, coming of legal age at eighteen, was required to serve two years in the cadet corps, stationed the first year at the Peiraeus, and on frontier posts the second.
80 When citizens were called out for military service, if it was not necessary to call the whole body of reserves, the men of some specified age were called. e.g. all between the ages of twenty and thirty, or twenty and forty （cp. Aeschin. 2.133）. Since the names of the men of a given age were kept in the register under the name of the Archon Eponymos in whose year they came of age, such a levy was called στρατεία ἐν τοῖς ἐπωνύμοις. If only a part of such an age-group was called out, it was called a division levy （στρατεία ἐν τοῖς μέρεσιν）.
81 In 363 b.c. See Xen. Hell. 7.2.17 ff.
82 In 357 and 349/8.
83 The critical engagement of the second of the expeditions to Euboea.
84 Each of the ten taxiarchs commanded the hoplites of a single tribe.
85 Phocion will later he called to support the prayer of the defence for acquittal.
86 See Dem. 9.16.
87 Aeschines has taken the historical review which he gives in Aeschin. 2.172-176 from the speech of Andocides, On the Peace with the Lacedaemonians （Andoc. 3.3 ff.） , condensing, and changing the phraseology at will, and changing the application of the facts which he cites. This sketch as given by Andocides is characterized by Eduard Meyer （Forschungen zur Alten Geschichte, 2.132 ff.） as a caricature of the actual course of events, valuable only as a convincing proof of the untrustworthiness of oral tradition, and of the rapidity and certainty with which confusion and error as to historical facts develop, even in the mind of a contemporary who has had a prominent part in the events.
88 The proxenus was a citizen who was employed by a foreign state to represent its interests in his own state.
89 This was in fact a five years' truce negotiated by Cimon, the son of Miltiades, in 450 b c. The truce lasted, not thirteen years, but less than five. The fortification of the Peiraeus belongs more than a quarter of a century earlier.
90 A corps of bowmen, Scythian slaves, owned by the state and used as city police.
91 The war with Aegina ended before the above-mentioned truce began.
92 The thirty years' peace was in fact made in 446/5, and was kept only fifteen years.
93 The beginning of the Peloponnesian war, 431 b.c.
94 The “Peace of Nicias” was negotiated in 421, but its terms were only partially fulfilled from the beginning, and very soon the war was in full operation again. Andocides places in this period, which he falsely assumes to be one of peace, events that belong to the Periclean period.
95 Athens entered into alliance with Argos, Mantineia, and Elis in 420. This immediately reopened the war with the Lacedaemonians.
96 The oligarchy of the Four Hundred was the result of the revolution of 411 b.c. The rule of the Thirty Tyrants followed the surrender of the city at the close of the Peloponnesian war. The Thirty were supported by a Spartan garrison （404-403）.
97 The setting up of the Thirty was dictated by Sparta.
98 Phyle, a post on the Boeotian frontier, was the rallying point of the band of exiles who began the movement for the expulsion of the Thirty
You see, fellow citizens, how certain persons have been making their preparations for this case: how they have mustered their forces, and how they have gone begging up and down the market place, in the attempt to prevent the fair and orderly course of justice in the state. But I have come trusting first in the gods, then in the laws and in you, believing that with you no scheming preparation can override law and justice.
I could wish, indeed, fellow citizens, that the Senate of Five Hundred and the assemblies of the people were properly conducted by those who preside over them, and the laws enforced which Solon enacted to secure orderly conduct on the part of public speakers; for then it would be permitted to the oldest citizen, as the law prescribes, to come forward to the platform first, with dignity, and, uninterrupted by shouting and tumult, out of his experience to advise for the good of the state and it would then be permitted to all other citizens who wished, one by one in turn, in order of age, to express their opinion on every question; for so, I think, the state would be best governed, and least litigation would arise.
But now all our standards of orderly procedure have been set aside; there are men who do not hesitate to make illegal motions, and other men who are ready to put these motions to the vote—not men who have been chosen by right and lawful allotment to preside, but men who hold the position by trickery; and if any other senator does actually obtain the presidency by lot, and does honestly declare your votes, he is threatened with impeachment by men who no longer regard citizenship as a common right, but as their own private perquisite; men who are making slaves of the common people, and arrogating lordship to themselves;
men who have set aside the lawful processes of the courts, and carry their verdicts in the assembly by appeal to passion.1 The result of all this is that we have ceased to hear that wisest and most judicious of all the proclamations to which the city was once accustomed, “Who of the men above fifty years of age wishes to address the people,” and then who of the other Athenians in turn. The disorder of the public men can no longer be controlled by the laws, nor by the prytanes, nor by the presiding officers, nor by the presiding tribe, the tenth part of the city.2
Under such circumstances, and in a political situation the gravity of which you yourselves understand, only one part of the constitution is left to us—if I too may lay claim to some discernment—the suits against illegal motions. But if you shall annul these also, or give way to those who are trying to annul them, I warn you that before you know it you will step by step have surrendered your rights to a faction.
There are, as you know, fellow-citizens, three forms of government in the world tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Tyrannies and oligarchies are administered according to the tempers of their lords, but democratic states according to their own established laws. Let no man among you forget this, but let each bear distinctly in mind that when he enters a court-room to sit as juror in a suit against an illegal motion, on that day he is to cast his vote for or against his own freedom of speech. This is why the lawgiver placed first in the jurors' oath these words, “I will vote according to the laws.” For he well knew that if the laws are faithfully upheld for the state, the democracy also is preserved.
This you ought always to remember, and to hate those who make illegal motions, and to hold no such offence as trivial, but every one as serious indeed. And you ought to let no man rob you of this right of yours, whether through the intercession of the generals, who by their cooperation with certain public men have this long time been outraging the constitution, or through petitions of foreigners, whom some bring in here, and so escape the courts, when their whole political career has been in defiance of the laws. But as each man of you would be ashamed to desert the post to which he had been assigned in war, so now you should be ashamed to desert the post to which the laws have called you, sentinels, guarding the democracy this day.
And another thing you have to remember: today your fellow citizens as a body have put the city and the constitution into your hands as a solemn trust. Some of them are present, listening to this case; others are absent, busy with their personal affairs. Respect them therefore, and remember the oaths which you have sworn, and the laws; and if I convict Ctesiphon of having made a motion that is illegal, false, and injurious to the state, annul the illegal motion, fellow citizens; confirm the democratic government for our state; punish those whose policies are opposed to the laws and to your interests. If in this spirit you listen to the words which are about to be spoken, I am sure that your verdict will be just, faithful to your oath, and salutary alike to yourselves and to the commonwealth.
I hope now that what I have said is a sufficient introduction to my complaint as a whole but I wish to speak briefly about the laws themselves which govern the rendering of account by public officers, the laws which are in fact violated by Ctesiphon's resolution.
In former times certain men who held the highest offices and administered the revenues—yes, and betrayed their every trust for money—would attach to themselves the public speakers of the senate-house and the assembly, and thus anticipate their day of accounting long in advance, with votes of thanks and with proclamations. The result was that when the time came for them to render their account, those who had charges to prefer fell into very great embarrassment, and this was even more the case with the jurors.
For great numbers of those who were subject to audit, though they were caught in the very act of stealing the public funds, went out from the court-room acquitted. And no wonder! For the jurors were ashamed, I imagine, to see the same man in the same city one day proclaimed at the festival as crowned by the people with a golden crown because of his virtue and justice, and then a little later to see the same man come out of the auditors' court convicted of theft. And so the jurors were forced to render,
not the verdict that fitted the actual crime, but one that would avert the shame of the people.
Now some statesman who had observed this situation caused a law to be passed—and a most excellent law it is—which expressly forbids crowning men before they have passed their final accounting. And yet in spite of this wise provision of the framer of the law, forms of statement have been invented which circumvent the laws; and unless you are warned of them you will be taken unawares and deceived. For among those men who contrary to the laws crown officers who have not yet submitted their accounts, some, who at heart are orderly citizens—if any one is really orderly who proposes illegal measures—at any rate some do make an attempt to cloak their shame; for they add to their decrees the proviso that the man who is subject to audit shall be crowned “after he shall have rendered account and submitted to audit of his office.”
The injury to the state is indeed no less, for the hearings for accounting are prejudiced by previous votes of thanks and crowns; but the man who makes the motion does show to the bearers that while he has made an illegal motion, he is ashamed of the wrong thing that he has done. But Ctesiphon, fellow citizens, overleaping the law that governs those who are subject to audit, and not deigning to resort to the pretext of which I have just spoken, has moved that before the accounting, before the auditing, you crown Demosthenes—in the midst of his term of office.
But, fellow citizens, in opposition to the statement of the case which I have just presented, they will urge a different argument; for they will say, forsooth, that whatever a man is called on to do under special enactment, this is not an “office,” but a sort of “commission” and “public service” and they will say that “offices” are those to which the Thesmothetae appoint men by lot in the Theseum, and those which are filled by popular election （the offices of general, cavalry commander, and associated offices）; but that all others are “employment under special enactment.”
Well, to their arguments I will oppose your law, a law which you yourselves passed in the expectation of silencing such pretexts; for it expressly says “the elective offices,” including all in a single phrase, calling everything which is filled by popular election an “office,” and specifying “the superintendents of public works.” But Demosthenes is in charge of the construction of walls, superintendent of the greatest of the works; “and all who have charge of any business of the state for more than thirty days, and all to whom is given the presidency of a court”; but every superintendent of public works holds the presidency of a court.3
What is it that the law commands these men to do? Not to “serve,” but “after approval by the court4 to hold office” （for even the officers who are selected by lot are not exempt from the scrutiny, but hold their office only after approval）; “and to submit their accounts before the clerk and board of auditors,” precisely as other officers are required to do. As proof of the truth of my statement, the laws themselves shall be read to you.“Laws”
When, therefore, fellow citizens, what the lawgiver names “offices,” they call “employments” and “commissions,” it is your duty to remember the law, and to set it against their shamelessness, and to remind them that you refuse to accept a rascally sophist, who expects to destroy the laws with phrases; but that when a man has made an illegal motion, the more cleverly he talks, the more angry will he find you. For by right, fellow citizens, the orator and the law ought to speak the same language; but when the law utters one voice and the orator another, you ought to give your vote to the just demand of the law, not to the shamelessness of the speaker.
But now to “the irrefutable argument,” as Demosthenes calls it, I wish to reply briefly in advance. For he will say, “I am in charge of the construction of walls; I admit it; but I have made a present of a hundred minas to the state, and I have carried out the work on a larger scale than was prescribed; what then is it that you want to audit? unless a man's patriotism is to be audited!” Now to this pretext hear my answer, true to the facts and beneficial to you.
In this city, so ancient and so great, no man is free from the audit who has held any public trust.
I will first cite cases where this would be least expected. For example, the law directs that priests and priestesses be subject to audit, all collectively, and each severally and individually—persons who receive perquisites only, and whose occupation is to pray to heaven for you; and they are made accountable not only separately, but whole priestly, families together, the Eumolpidae, the Ceryces, and all the rest.
Again, the law directs that the trierarchs be subject to audit, though they have had no public funds in their hands, and though they are not men who filch large sums from your treasury and pay out small ones, and not men who claim to be making donations when they are only paying back what is your own, but men who are acknowledged by all to have spent their family fortunes in their ambition to serve you.
Furthermore, not the trierarchs alone, but also the highest bodies in the state, come under the verdict of the courts of audit.
For, first, the Senate of the Areopagus is required by the law to file its accounts with the Board of Auditors and to submit to their examination; yes, even those men, who sit with solemn aspect yonder as the court of highest competence, are brought under your verdict. Shall the Senate of the Areopagus, then, receive no crown? They shall not, for such is not the tradition of our fathers. Have they, then, no love of honor? Indeed they have! They so love honor that they are not satisfied with merely keeping free from guilt, but they punish their members even for mistakes. But your politicians are pampered. Further, the lawgiver has made the Senate of Five Hundred subject to audit.
And so deep is his distrust of those who are subject to audit, that he says at the very beginning of the laws, “The officer who has not yet submitted his accounts shall not leave the country?” “Heracles !” some one may answer, “because I held an office may I not leave the country?” No, for fear you may make profit of the public money or the public acts, and then run away. Furthermore, the man who is subject to audit is not allowed to consecrate his property, or to make a votive offering, or to receive adoption,5 or to dispose of his property by will and he is under many other prohibitions. In a word, the lawgiver holds under attachment the property of all who are subject to audit, until their accounts shall have been audited.
“Yes, but there is a man who has received no public funds and spent none, but has simply had something to do with administrative matters.” He too is commanded to render account to the auditors. “And how shall the man who has received nothing and spent nothing render account to the state?” The law itself suggests and teaches what he is to write; for it commands him to file precisely this statement, “I have neither received nor spent any public funds.” There is nothing in all the state that is exempt from audit, investigation, and examination. As proof of what I say, hear the laws themselves.“Laws”
So when Demosthenes at the height of his impudence shall say that because the money was a gift he is not subject to audit, suggest this to him: was it not, then, your duty, Demosthenes, to allow the herald of the Board of Auditors to make this proclamation, sanctioned by law and custom, “Who wishes to prefer charges?” Let any citizen who wishes have the opportunity to claim that you have given nothing, but that from the large sums under your control you have spent a mere trifle on the repair of the walls, whereas you have received ten talents from the city for this work. Do not grab honor; do not snatch the jurors' ballots from their hands; do not in your political career go before the laws, but follow them. For so is the democracy upheld.
As an answer then to the empty pretexts that they will bring forward, let what I have said suffice. But that Demosthenes was in fact subject to audit at the time when the defendant made his motion, since he held the office of Superintendent of the Theoric Fund6 as well as the office of Commissioner for the Repair of Walls, and at that time bad not rendered to you his account and reckoning for either office, this I will now try to show you from the public records. Read, if you please, in what archonship and in what month and on what day and in what assembly Demosthenes was elected a Superintendent of the Theoric Fund.“Enumeration of the Days”
If now I should prove nothing beyond this, Ctesiphon would be justly convicted, for it is not my complaint that convicts him, but the public records.
In earlier times, fellow citizens, the city used to elect a Comptroller of the Treasury, who every prytany made to the people a report of the revenues. But because of the trust which you placed in Eubulus, those who were elected Superintendents of the Theoric Fund held （until the law of Hegemon was passed） the office of Comptroller of the Treasury and the office of Receiver of Moneys; they also controlled the dockyards, had charge of the naval arsenal that was building, and were Superintendents of Streets; almost the whole administration of the state was in their hands.
I say this, not to accuse or blame them, but because I wish to show you this: that while the lawgiver, in case any one is subject to audit for a single office—though it be the least—does not permit him to be crowned until lie has rendered his account and submitted to audit, Ctesiphon did not hesitate to move to crown Demosthenes, who was holding all the offices in Athens at once.
Furthermore I will present to you Demosthenes himself as witness to the fact that at the time when Ctesiphon made his motion, Demosthenes was holding the office of Commissioner for the Repair of Walls, and so was handling public funds, imposing fines like the other magistrates, and privileged to preside in court.7 For in the archonship of Chaerondas, on the last day but one of Thargelion,8 Demosthenes made a motion in the assembly that on the second and third days of Skirophorion assemblies of the tribes be held; and he directed in his decree that men be chosen from each tribe as superintendents and treasurers for the work upon the walls; and very properly, that the city might have responsible persons upon whom to call for an accounting of the money spent. Please read the decree.“Decree”
Yes, but he immediately tries to wriggle out of this by saying that it was not the people who elected him, or appointed him by lot, as Commissioner of Walls. On this point Demosthenes and Ctesiphon will argue at length. But the law is brief and clear and it makes short work of their devices. I wish first to speak to you briefly about this.
There are, fellow citizens, three classes of public officers. The first and most obvious class are all who are appointed by lot or by election; the second class are those who administer some public business for more than thirty days, and the Commissioners of Public Works; but third it stands written in the law that if any others receive presidencies of courts,9 they also shall “hold office on passing their scrutiny.”
Now when you subtract those officials who are chosen by popular election and those appointed by lot, there remain those whom the tribes, the trittyes,10 and the demes appoint from among their own number to administer public funds. This happens when, as in the present case, some work is assigned to the several tribes, like the digging of trenches or the building of triremes. That what I say is true, you shall learn from the laws themselves.“Laws”
Recall now what has been said: the lawgiver directs that after approval in court11 those appointed by the tribes shall “hold office”; but the tribe Pandionis appointed Demosthenes an “officer,” a Builder of Walls; and he has received for this work from the general treasury nearly ten talents. Another law forbids crowning an official before he has rendered his accounts, and you have sworn to vote according to the laws; but yonder politician has moved to crown the man who has not yet rendered his accounts, and he has not added “when he shall have rendered account and submitted to audit” and I convict him of the unlawful act, bringing as my witnesses the laws, the decrees, and the defendants. How could one more clearly prove that a man has made an unlawful motion?
Furthermore, I will show you that the proclamation of the crown, as proposed in his decree, is to be made in an illegal manner. For the law expressly commands that if the Senate confer a crown, the crown shall be proclaimed in the senate-house, and if the people confer it, in the assembly, “and nowhere else.” Read me the law.“Law”
This, fellow citizens, is an excellent law. For it seems that it was the idea of the lawgiver that the public man ought not to be thinking of outsiders as he receives his honors, but to be well content with honor received in the city itself and from the people; and that he ought not to treat such proclamations as a source of revenue. So thought the lawgiver. But Ctesiphon how? Read his decree.“Decree”
You hear, fellow citizens, how the lawgiver commands that the man who is crowned by the people be proclaimed among the people, on the Pnyx, at a meeting of the assembly, “and nowhere else”; but Ctesiphon, in the theater—not only overriding the laws but also changing the place; not when the Athenians are in assembly, but when tragedies are being performed; not in the presence of the people, but in the presence of the Hellenes, that they also may know what sort of man we honor.
Having, then, made a motion that is so manifestly illegal, he will call Demosthenes as his ally and bring up the artifices of rhetoric for the assault on the laws. These tricks I will reveal and of these I will forewarn you, lest you be taken unawares and deceived.
They will not be able to deny that the laws forbid the man who is crowned by the people to be proclaimed outside the assembly, but they will present for their defence the Dionysiac law, and will use a certain portion of the law, cheating your ears.
For they will offer a law that has nothing to do with this case, and will say that the city has two laws governing proclamations: one, the law that I now offer in evidence, which expressly forbids the man who is crowned by the people to be proclaimed outside the assembly; but they will say that there is another law, contradictory to this, and that that law has given authority for the proclamation of the crown at the time of the tragedies in the theater, “if the people vote.” And so they will say that it is in accordance with that law that Ctesiphon has made his motion.
Now against their tricks I will introduce your own laws as my advocates, as indeed I earnestly try to do throughout this whole prosecution. For if what they say is true, and such a custom has crept into your government that invalid laws stand written among the valid, and that there exist two laws concerning one and the same action, which contradict each other, how could any man longer call this a “government,” if in it the laws command to do and not to do one and the same thing?
But that is not the case. May you never reach the point where your laws are in such disorder as that! Nor was the lawgiver who established the democracy guilty of such neglect; he has expressly laid upon the Thesmothetae12 the duty of making an annual revision of the laws in the presence of the people, prescribing sharp investigation and examination, in order to determine whether any law stands written which contradicts another law, or an invalid law stands among the valid, or whether more laws than one stand written to govern each action.
And if they find such a thing, they are required to write it out and post it on bulletins in front of the Eponymi;13 and the prytanes are required to call a meeting of the assembly, writing at the head of the call, “For Nomothetae”;14 and the chairman of the presiding officers must submit to vote15 the question of the removal of one set of laws and the retention of the other, in order that for each action there may be one law and no more. Please read the laws.“Laws”
If now, fellow citizens, what they assert were true, and two laws had been in force governing proclamations, I think the Thesmothetae would necessarily have searched them out, and the prytanes would have referred them to the Nomothetae, and one or the other of the two laws would have been repealed, either the law that gave authority for the proclamation, or the law that forbade it. But seeing that no such thing has been done, surely what they say is demonstrated to be, not only false, but absolutely impossible.
But I will show you where they get this false assertion. First, however, I will tell the reason why the laws governing the proclamations in the theater were enacted. It frequently happened that at the performance of the tragedies in the city proclamations were made without authorization of the people, now that this or that man was crowned by his tribe, now that others were crowned by the men of their deme, while other men by the voice of the herald manumitted their household slaves, and made all Hellas their witness;
and, most invidious of all, certain men who had secured positions as agents of foreign states managed to have proclaimed that they were crowned—it might be by the people of Rhodes, or of Chios, or of some other state—in recognition of their merit and uprightness. And this they did, not like those who were crowned by your senate or by the people, by first obtaining your consent and by your decree, and after establishing large claims upon your gratitude, but themselves reaching out after the honor with no authorization from you.
The result of this practice was that the spectators, the choregi, and the actors alike were discommoded, and that those who were crowned in the theater received greater honors than those whom the people crowned. For the latter had a place prescribed where they must receive their crown, the assembly of the people, and proclamation “anywhere else” was forbidden; but the others were proclaimed in the presence of all the Hellenes; the one class with your consent, by your decree; the other, without decree.
Now some legislator, seeing this, caused a law to be enacted which has nothing to do with the law concerning those who are crowned by our people, and did not supersede it. For it was not the assembly that was being disturbed, but the theater; and he was not enacting a law contradictory to the previously existing laws, for that may not be done; but a law governing those who, without your decree, are crowned by their tribe or deme, and governing the freeing of slaves, and also the foreign crowns. He expressly forbids the manumission of a slave in the theater, or the proclamation of a crown by the tribe or deme, “or by any one else,” he says, “and the herald who disobeys shall lose his civic rights.”
When, therefore, the lawgiver designates, for those who are crowned by the senate, the senate-house as the place of proclamation, and, for those who are crowned by the people, the assembly, and when he forbids those who are crowned by the demes or tribes to be proclaimed at the tragedies—that no one may try to get spurious honor by begging crowns and proclamations, and when in the law he further forbids proclamation being made by any one else, senate, people, tribe, and deme being thus eliminated—when one takes these away, what is it that is left except the foreign crowns?
For the truth of my assertion I will show you a strong argument derived from the laws themselves. For the golden crown itself which is proclaimed in the city theater the law takes from the man who is crowned, and commands that it be dedicated to Athena. And yet who among you would dare to charge the Athenian people with such illiberality? For certainly no state, nay, not even a private person—not one—would be so mean as to proclaim a crown and at the same moment demand back the gift which he himself had made. But I think it is because the crown is the gift of foreigners that the dedication is made, lest any one set a higher value upon the gratitude of a foreign state than upon that of his own country, and so become corrupted.
But the other crown, the crown that is proclaimed in the assembly, no one dedicates, but he is permitted to keep it, that not only he, but also his descendants, having the memorial in their house, may never become disloyal to the democracy. And the reason why the lawgiver also forbade the proclamation of the foreign crown in the theater “unless the people vote,” is this: he would have the state that wishes to crown any one of your citizens send ambassadors and ask permission of the people, for so he who is proclaimed will be more grateful to you for permitting the proclamation than to those who confer the crown. But to show that my statements are true, hear the laws themselves.“Laws”
When, therefore, they try to deceive you, and say that it is added in the law that the bestowal of the crown is permitted “if the people vote,” do not forget to suggest to them, Yes, if it is another state that is crowning you; but if it is the Athenian people, a place is designated for you where the ceremony must be performed; it is forbidden you to be crowned outside the assembly. For you may spend the whole day in explaining the meaning of the words “and nowhere else”; you will never show that his motion is lawful.
But that part of my accusation remains upon which I lay greatest stress: the pretext upon which he claims that the crown is deserved. It reads thus in his motion : “And the herald shall proclaim in the theater in the presence of the Hellenes that the Athenian people crown him for his merit and uprightness,” and that monstrous assertion, “because he continually speaks and does what is best for the people.”
You see how entirely simple the remainder of our argument becomes, and how easy for you, my hearers, to weigh. For it is obviously incumbent upon me, the complainant, to show this to you, that the praise given to Demosthenes is false, and that he never began to “speak what was best,” nor now “continues to do what is good for the people.” If I show this, then Ctesiphon will doubtless lose his case, and justly; for all the laws forbid inserting falsehoods in the decrees of the people. But the defence must show the opposite of this. And you are to be the judges of our pleas.
The case is this: To review the private life of Demosthenes would, in my opinion, demand too long a speech. And why need I tell it all now? the story of what happened to him in the matter of the suit over the wound, when he summoned his own cousin, Demomeles of Paeania, before the Areopagus;16 and the cut on his head; or the story of the generalship of Cephisodotus, and the naval expedition to the Hellespont,
when Demosthenes as one of the trierarchs carried the general on his ship, and shared his table, his sacrifices, and his libations and how after he had been thus honored because the general was an old friend of his father's, he did not hesitate, when the general was impeached, and was on trial for his life, to become one of his accusers; or, again, that story about Meidias and the blow of the fist that Demosthenes got when he was choregus, in the orchestra, and how for thirty minas he sold both the insult to himself and the vote of censure that the people had passed against Meidias in the theater of Dionysus.17
Now these incidents and all the others like them I think it is best to pass over; not that I would betray you, gentlemen of the jury, or politely yield this case to him, but because I fear that I shall encounter in you the feeling that, while all this is true, it is an old story, admitted by everybody. And yet, Ctesiphon, when a man's utter shame is so credible to the hearers and so notorious that his accuser seems, not to be speaking what is false, but what is stale, and what everybody admits at the outset, ought that man to be crowned with a golden crown, or ought he to be censured? And you, who had the effrontery to make your false and unlawful motion, ought you to despise the courts, or ought you to give satisfaction to the city?
But concerning the crimes of his public life I will try to speak more explicitly. For I understand that when the defence are given opportunity to speak, Demosthenes will enumerate to you four periods in the history of the city as the periods of his own political activity.18 One of them, and the first, as I hear, he reckons as the time of our war with Philip over Amphipolis. He marks this off by the peace and alliance that were made on motion of Philocrates of Hagnus, and with the cooperation of Demosthenes himself, as I shall show.
And he says that the second period was the time while we kept the peace, doubtless up to that day on which this same orator put an end to the existing peace, by himself introducing the motion for war; and the third period, the period of war, up to the events of Chaeronea; and the fourth, the present period. When he has enumerated these, he intends, as I hear, to call me forward and ask me to tell him for which of these four periods I accuse him, and when it is that I say that his policy has not been for the best interests of the people. And if I refuse to answer, and cover my face and run away, he says he will come and uncover me and lead me to the platform, and force me to answer.
In order, then, that he may lose his confidence, and that you may be instructed in advance, and that I may reply, in the presence of the jury, Demosthenes, and of all the other citizens who are standing there outside the bar, and of all the other Greeks who have taken the trouble to listen to this case—and I see that not a few are here, more in fact than have ever attended a public trial within the memory of any man—I answer you that for all the four periods which you enumerate I accuse you.
And if the gods permit, and the jurors give us an impartial hearing, and I am able to call to mind all that I know about you, I confidently expect to show to the jury that for the safety of the city it is the gods who are responsible, and the men who in the crisis have treated the city with humanity and moderation;19 but for all our misfortunes, Demosthenes. The order of my treatment shall be that which I understand he will follow; and I will speak first concerning the first period, second concerning the second, third concerning the next, and fourth concerning the present situation. So now I address myself to the peace which you and Philocrates formally proposed.
You could have made that former peace,20 fellow citizens, supported by the joint action of a congress of the Greek states, if certain men had allowed you to wait for the return of the embassies which at that crisis you had sent out among the Greeks, with the call to join you against Philip; and in the course of time the Greeks would of their own accord have accepted your hegemony again. Of this you were deprived, thanks to Demosthenes and Philocrates, and the bribes which they took in their conspiracy against the common weal.
But if such a statement as I have just made, falling suddenly on your ears, is too incredible to some of you, permit me to suggest how you ought to listen to the rest of my argument: When we take our seats to audit the accounts of expenditures which extend back a long time, it doubtless sometimes happens that we come from home with a false impression; nevertheless, when the accounts have been balanced, no man is so stubborn as to refuse, before he leaves the room, to assent to that conclusion, whatever it may be, which the figures themselves establish.
I ask you to give a similar hearing now. If some of you have come from home with the opinion, formed in the past, that of course Demosthenes has never in conspiracy with Philocrates said a word in Philip's interest—if any man of you is under such impression, let him decide nothing either way, aye or no, until he has heard; for that would not be fair. But if, as I briefly recall the dates, and cite the resolutions which Demosthenes moved in cooperation with Philocrates, the truthful audit of the facts shall convict Demosthenes of having moved more resolutions than Philocrates concerning the original peace and alliance,
and of having flattered Philip and his ambassadors with a shamelessness which was beyond measure, and of being responsible to the people for the failure to secure the concurrence of a general congress of the Greek states in the making of the peace, and of having betrayed to Philip Cersobleptes, king of Thrace, a friend and ally of our city—if I shall clearly demonstrate all this to you, I shall make of you this modest request: in God's name agree with me, that in the first of his four periods his policies have not been those of a good citizen. I will speak in a way that will enable you to follow me most easily.
Philocrates made a motion21 that we permit Philip to send to us a herald and ambassadors to treat concerning peace. This motion was attacked in the courts as illegal. The time of the trial came. Lycinus, who had indicted him, spoke for the prosecution; Philocrates made answer for himself, and Demosthenes spoke in his behalf;22 Philocrates was cleared. After this came the archonship of Themistocles.23 Now Demosthenes came in as senator, not drawn by the lot either as a member of the senate or as a substitute, but through intrigue and bribery; the purpose of it was to enable him to support Philocrates in every way, by word and deed, as the event itself made evident.
For now Philocrates carries a second resolution, providing for the election of ten ambassadors, who shall go to Philip and ask him to send hither plenipotentiaries to negotiate peace. Of these ambassadors one was Demosthenes. On his return, Demosthenes was a eulogist of the peace, he agreed with the other ambassadors in their report, and he alone of the senators moved to give safe-conduct to Philip's herald and ambassadors; and in this motion he was in accord with Philocrates, for the one had given permission to send a herald and ambassadors hither, the other gave safe-conduct to the embassy.
As to what followed, I beg you now to pay especial attention. For negotiations were entered into—not with the other ambassadors, who were slandered again and again by Demosthenes after he had changed face, but with Philocrates and Demosthenes （naturally, for they were at once ambassadors and authors of the motions）—first, that you should not wait for the ambassadors whom you had sent out with your summons against Philip, for they wished you to make the peace, not together with the Greeks, but by yourselves;
secondly, that you should vote, not only for peace, but also for alliance with Philip, in order that any states which were taking note of what the Athenian democracy was doing might fall into utter discouragement on seeing that, while you were summoning them to war, you had at home voted to make both peace and an alliance; and thirdly, that Cersobleptes, king of Thrace, should not be included in the oaths, nor share the alliance and peace—indeed, an expedition was already being levied against him.
Now the man who was buying such services was doing no wrong, for before the oaths had been taken and the agreements entered into, he could not be blamed for negotiating to his own advantage; but the men who sold, who admitted Philip into partnership in the control of the strongholds of the state, were deserving of your great indignation. For the man who now shouts, “Down with Alexander!” and in those days, “Down with Philip!” the man who throws in my face the friendship of Alexander, this man Demosthenes,
stole away the opportunities of the city by making the motion that the prytanes call an assembly for the eighth day of Elaphebolion, the day of the sacrifice to Asclepius, and the introductory day of the festival24—the sacred day—a thing that no man remembers ever to have been done before. And what was his pretext? “In order,” he says, “that if Philip's ambassadors shall by that time have arrived, the people may most speedily deliberate on their relations with Philip.” He thus appropriates the assembly for the ambassadors in advance, before their arrival, cutting short your time, and hurrying on the whole business; and this was in order that you might make the peace, not in cooperation with the other Greeks, on the return of your ambassadors,25 but alone.
After this, fellow citizens, Philip's ambassadors arrived26 but yours were absent, summoning the Greeks against Philip. Thereupon Demosthenes carries another resolution, in which he provides that we take counsel, not only regarding peace, but on the subject of an alliance also; and that we should do this without waiting for your ambassadors to return, but immediately after the City Dionysia, on the 18th and 19th of the month. As proof of the truth of what I say, hear the resolutions.“Resolutions”
When now, fellow citizens, the Dionysia were past and the assemblies took place, in the first assembly a resolution of the synod of the allies was read,27 the substance of which I will give briefly before having it read to you. First, they provided only that you should take counsel regarding peace, and omitted the word “alliance”—and that not inadvertently, but because they looked upon even the peace as necessary, rather than honorable; secondly, they met Demosthenes' bribery with a well-chosen remedy,
by adding in their resolution that any Greek state that wished should be permitted within the space of three months to have its name inscribed with the Athenians on the same stone, and to share the oaths and agreements. In this way they were taking two precautions, and those of the greatest importance; for first, they provided the period of three months, a sufficient time for the ambassadors of the Greek states to arrive; and secondly, they sought to secure to the city the good-will of the Greeks, by the provision for a general congress, in order that in case the agreements should be violated, we might not enter upon the war unprepared and alone—the misfortune that actually came upon us, thanks to Demosthenes. Now that what I say is true, you shall learn by hearing the resolution itself“Resolution of the Allies”
I acknowledge that I supported this resolution, as did all who spoke in the first of the two assemblies; and the people left the assembly with substantially this supposition, that peace would be made （that, however, it was better not to discuss an alliance, because of our summons to the Greeks）, and that the peace would be shared by all the Greeks. Night intervened. We came the next day to the assembly. Then it was that Demosthenes, hastening to get possession of the platform, and leaving no other man an opportunity to speak, said that the propositions of yesterday were utterly useless unless Philip's ambassadors could be persuaded to assent to them. He further said that he could not conceive of peace without alliance.
For he said we must not—I remember the expression he used, for the word was as odious as the man—he said we must not “rip off” the alliance from the peace, nor wait for the slow decisions of the other Greeks, but we must either fight ourselves, or by ourselves make the peace. And finally he called Antipater28 to the platform, and proceeded to ask him a certain question—he had previously told him what he gas going to ask, and had instructed him what he was to answer, to the injury of the state. Finally this thing prevailed, Demosthenes forcing you to it by his talk, and Philocrates moving the resolution.
One thing remained now for them to do—to betray Cersobleptes and the Thracian coast. This they accomplished on the 25th of Elaphebolion, before Demosthenes set out on the second embassy, the embassy for the ratification of the oaths （for this orator of ours, this man who shouts “Down with Alexander!” and “Down with Philip!” has twice been an ambassador to Macedonia, when he need not have gone once—the man who now bids you spit on the Macedonians）. Presiding over the assembly on the 25th, for he had gained a seat in the senate by intrigue,29 he, with the help of Philocrates, betrayed Cersobleptes;
for Philocrates unobserved slipped this clause in among the provisions of his resolution, and Demosthenes put it to the vote, that “The members of the synod of the allies do on this day give their oaths to the ambassadors from Philip.” But no representative of Cersobleptes had a seat in the synod and so in providing that those who were sitting in the synod should give oath, he excluded Cersobleptes from the oaths, for he had no place in the synod.30
As proof that I am speaking the truth, read, if you please, who it was that made this motion, and who it was that put it to vote.“Resolution”
An excellent thing, fellow citizens, an excellent thing is the preservation of the public acts. For the record remains undisturbed, and does not shift sides with political turncoats, but whenever the people desire, it gives them opportunity to discern who have been rascals of old, but have now changed face and claim to be honorable men.
It remains for me to describe his flattery. For Demosthenes, fellow citizens, was senator for a year, yet he will be found never to have invited any other embassy to the seat of honor31—nay, that was the first and the only time; and he placed cushions and spread rugs; and at daybreak he came escorting the ambassadors into the theater, so that he was actually hissed for his unseemly flattery. And when they set out on their return journey, he hired for them three span of mules, and escorted the ambassadors as far as Thebes, making the city ridiculous. But that I may not wander from my subject, please take the resolution concerning the seats of honor.“Resolution”
Now this man it was, fellow citizens, this past master of flattery, who, when informed through scouts of Charidemus32 that Philip was dead, before any one else had received the news, made up a vision for himself and lied about the gods, pretending that he had received the news, not from Charidemus, but from Zeus and Athena, the gods by whose name he perjures himself by day, and who then converse with him in the night, as he says, and tell him of things to come. And though it was but the seventh day after the death of his daughter, and though the ceremonies of mourning were not yet completed, he put a garland on his head and white raiment on his body, and there he stood making thank-offerings, violating all decency—miserable man, who had lost the first and only one who ever called him “father”!
Not that I reproach him for his misfortune, but I am probing his character. For the man who hates his child and is a bad father could never become a safe guide to the people; the man who does not cherish the persons who are nearest and dearest to him, will never care much about you, who are not his kinsmen; the man who is wicked in his private relations would never be found trustworthy in public affairs; and the man who is base at home was never a good and honorable man in Macedonia, for by his journey he changed his position, not his disposition.
Now how it was that he came to reverse his policies （for this is the second period）,33 and what is the reason that policies identical with those of Demosthenes led to the impeachment and exile of Philocrates,34 while Demosthenes suddenly stood forth as accuser of the rest, and how it is that the pestilential fellow has plunged you into misfortune, this you ought now especially to hear.
For as soon as Philip had come this side Thermopylae, and contrary to all expectation had destroyed the cities of Phocis, and strengthened the Thebans beyond what was seasonable and advantageous for you, as you then thought, and when you in alarm had brought in your movable property from the country districts, and the ambassadors who had negotiated the peace were under the gravest accusation—Philocrates and Demosthenes far beyond all the rest, because they not only had been ambassadors, but were also the authors of the resolutions,
and when it happened at the same time that Demosthenes and Philocrates had a falling out—you were able to guess the reasons without much difficulty—when all this disturbance had arisen, then Demosthenes proceeded to take counsel as to his future course, consulting his own innate corruption, his cowardice, and his jealousy of Philocrates' bribes; and he came to the conclusion that if he should step forward as the accuser of his colleagues on the embassy and of Philip, Philocrates would surely be ruined, his other colleagues would be put in jeopardy, and he himself would gain favour, and—scoundrel and traitor to his friends—would appear to be a faithful servant of the people.
Now when the men who are always the foes of public tranquillity caught sight of him, they were delighted, and repeatedly called him to the platform, and named him our sole and only incorruptible citizen; and he as often came forward and furnished them with the sources of disturbance and war. He it is, fellow citizens, who first discovered Serrhium-Teichus and Doriscus and Ergisca and Myrtisca and Ganus and Ganias;35 for before that we did not even know the names of these places. And he put such forced and perverse interpretation upon what was done, that, if Philip did not send ambassadors, Demosthenes said that Philip was treating the city with contempt; and if he did send them, that he was sending spies, not ambassadors;
and if Philip was willing to refer our differences to some state as an equal and impartial arbiter, he said that between Philip and us there was no impartial arbiter. Philip offered to give us Halonnesus; Demosthenes forbade us to accept it if he “gave it,” instead of “giving it back,” quarrelling over syllables.36 And finally, by bestowing crowns of honor on the embassy which Aristodemus led to Thessaly and Magnesia contrary to the provisions of the peace, he violated the peace and prepared the final disaster and the war.
Yes, but with walls of brass and steel, as he himself says, he fortified our land, by the alliance with Euboea and Thebes. Nay, fellow citizens, it is just here that you have been most wronged and most deceived. But eager as I am to speak about that wonderful alliance with Thebes, I will speak first about the Euboeans, that I may follow the events in their order.
You, fellow citizens, had suffered many serious injuries at the hands of Mnesarchus of Chalcis, father of Callias and Taurosthenes, men whom Demosthenes now for gold dares to propose for enrollment as Athenian citizens; and again at the hands of Themison of Etretria, who in time of peace robbed us of Oropus; but you were willing to overlook these wrongs, and when the Thebans had crossed over into Euboea in an attempt to enslave its cities,37 in five days you went to their rescue with fleet and troops, and before thirty days had passed you brought the Thebans to terms and sent them home; and being now yourselves in complete control of Euboea, you righteously and justly restored the cities themselves and their constitutions to those who had entrusted them to you; for you felt that it was not right to cherish your anger, now that they had put faith in you.
After receiving such benefits at your hands, the Chalcidians did not requite you with like treatment, but as soon as you had crossed over to Euboea to help Plutarchus,38 while at first they did pretend to be friends to you, yet as soon as we had come to Tamynae and had crossed the mountain called Cotylaeum, then Callias the Chalcidian, who had been the object of Demosthenes' hired praises,
seeing the troops of our city shut up in a place which was difficult and dangerous, from which there was no withdrawal unless we could win a battle, and where there was no hope of succor from land or sea, collected troops from all Euboea, and sent to Philip for reinforcements, while his brother, Taurosthenes, who nowadays shakes hands with us all and smiles in our faces, brought over the mercenaries from Phocis, and together they came upon us to destroy us.39
And had not, in the first place, some god saved the army, and had not then your soldiers, horse and foot, showed themselves brave men, and conquered the enemy in a pitched battle by the hippodrome at Tamynae, and brought them to terms and sent them back, our city would have been in danger of the greatest disaster. For it is not ill fortune in war that is the greatest calamity, but when one hazards success against unworthy foes and then fails, the misfortune is naturally twofold.
But yet, even after such treatment as that, you became reconciled to them again; and Callias of Chalcis, obtaining pardon from you,
soon made haste to return to his natural disposition, and tried ostensibly to assemble a Euboean congress at Chalcis, but in fact to strengthen Euboea thoroughly against you, and to win the position of tyrant as his own personal reward. Then, hoping to get Philip's help, he went to Macedonia, and travelled about with him, and was named a “comrade.”40
But having wronged Philip and run away from thence, he made haste to throw himself at the feet of the Thebans. Then abandoning them also, and making more twists and turns than the Euripus, by whose shores he used to live, he falls between the hatred of the Thebans and of Philip. At his wits' end what to do, when an expedition had already been called out against him, he saw one gleam of hope for safety left—to get the Athenian people solemnly bound, under the name of allies, to aid him if any one should attack, a thing that was sure to happen unless you should prevent it.
With this plan in view Callias sent ambassadors hither,41 Glaucetes, Empedon, and Diodorus the long distance runner, who brought to the people empty hopes, but silver to Demosthenes and his following. And he was buying three things at once: first, to be assured of your alliance, for he had no alternative if the people, remembering his past crimes, should refuse the alliance, since one of two things was sure, that he would be banished from Chalcis, or be caught and put to death—such were the forces that were moving against him, the combined power of Philip and the Thebans; and the second service for which the pay came to the man who was to move the alliance, was to provide that the Chalcidians should not sit in the synod at Athens;42 and the third was that they should pay no contributions to the league. Now in not one of these plans did Callias fail;
and Demosthenes, the tyrant-hater, as he pretends to be, who, Ctesiphon says, “speaks what is best,”43 bartered away the opportunities of the city, and in his motion for the alliance provided that we were to aid the Chalcidians, stipulating in return for this a mere phrase; for he added, to make it sound well, “The Chalcidians on their part are to bring aid if any one shall come against Athens”;
but the membership in the synod and the contributions of money, the sources of strength for the coming war, he sold completely, in fairest words proposing most shameful deeds, and leading you on by his talk, telling how our city must first furnish aid to any Greeks who might need it from time to time, but provide for their alliance afterward, after giving them aid. But that you may be sure that I am speaking the truth, please take the motion for the alliance proposed for the benefit of Callias. Read the resolution.“Resolution”
But this was only the beginning of outrage—this actual selling of such opportunities and accessions to the league and contributions of money for that which I am about to relate was far worse, as you shall see. For Callias was led on to such a pitch of insolence and arrogance, and Demosthenes—whom Ctesiphon praises—to such a pitch of rapacity for bribes, that, while you still had life and sight and senses, they succeeded in stealing away from you the contributions of Oreus and Eretria, ten talents in all, and they detached from you the delegates from those cities, and carried them back to Chalcis, uniting them in the so-called Euboean Congress. But how they did it and by what crimes, it is high time for you to hear.
Callias, depending no longer on messengers, came himself to you,44 and coming forward in your assembly repeated a speech that Demosthenes had prepared for him. He said that he had just come from the Peloponnesus, and that he had made arrangements for contributions which would yield a revenue of not less than one hundred talents for use against Philip; and he counted off what each state was to pay: the united Achaeans and the Megarians sixty talents, and the united cities in Euboea, forty.
From this fund he said we could be sure of forces by land and sea, adding that there were many other Greeks who wished to share in contributing, so that there would be no lack of money or men. So much was openly told; but he said that he had also conducted other negotiations in secret, and that certain of our citizens were witnesses of them; finally he called on Demosthenes by name and bade him confirm his statements.
Demosthenes came forward with a most solemn air, praised Callias above measure, and pretended to know the secret business; but he said that he wished to report to you his own recent mission to the Peloponnesus and Acarnania. The sum of what he said was that all Peloponnesus could be counted on, and that he had brought all the Acarnanians into line against Philip; that the contributions of money were sufficient to provide for the manning of one hundred swift ships, and to employ ten thousand foot soldiers and a thousand cavalry;
and that in addition to these forces the citizen troops would be ready, from the Peloponnesus more than two thousand hoplites, and as many more from Acarnania that the leadership of them all was given to you, and that all this was going to be done, not after a long interval, but by the 16th of Anthesterion;45 for he himself had given notice in the cities, and invited all the delegates to come to Athens by the time of the full moon to take part in a congress.46 For this is Demosthenes' personal and peculiar way of doing things:
other deceivers, when they are lying, try to speak in vague and ambiguous terms, afraid of being convicted; but Demosthenes, when he is cheating you, first adds an oath to his lie, calling down destruction on himself; and secondly, predicting an event that he knows will never happen, he dares to tell the date of it; and he tells the names of men, when he has never so much as seen their faces, deceiving your ears and imitating men who tell the truth. And this is, indeed, another reason why he richly deserves your hatred, that he is not only a scoundrel himself, but destroys your faith even in the signs and symbols of honesty.
But now when he had said this, he gave the clerk a resolution to read, longer than the Iliad, but more empty than the speeches that he is accustomed to deliver and the life that he has lived. Empty did I say? Nay, full of hopes that were not to be realized and of armies that were never to be assembled. And leading you off out of sight of his fraud, and suspending you on hopes, at last he gathers all up in a motion that you choose ambassadors to go to Eretria and beg the Eretrians—of course it was necessary to beg!—no longer to pay their contribution of five talents to you,47 but to Callias; and further, that you choose other ambassadors to go to Oreus to beg the people of that city to make common cause with the Athenians.
Here again, in this resolution, you see how entirely absorbed he is in his thievery, for he also moves that your ambassadors ask the people of Oreus to give their five talents, not to you, but to Callias. But to prove that I am speaking the truth, read—leave out the grandiloquence and the triremes and the pretence, and come to the trick worked on us by the vile and wicked man, who, according to Ctesiphon's motion which we are discussing, “constantly speaks and does what is best for the people of Athens.”“Resolution”
So then the triremes and the land forces and the full moon and the congress were so much talk for your ears, but the contributions of the allies, those ten talents, were very real, and you lost them.
It remains for me to say that Demosthenes was paid three talents for making this motion: a talent from Chalcis, paid over by Callias, a talent from Eretria, paid by the tyrant Cleitarchus, and a talent from Oreus. And it was this last by means of which he was found out; for the government of Oreus is a democracy, and everything is done there by popular vote. Now they, exhausted by the war and entirely without means, sent to him Gnosidemus, son of Charigenes, a man who had once been powerful in Oreus, to ask him to release the city from paying the talent, and to offer him a statue of bronze to be set up in Oreus.
But he replied to Gnosidemus that the last thing that he was in need of was bronze, and he tried to collect the talent through Callias. Now the people of Oreus, pressed for payment and without means, mortgaged to him the public revenues as security for the talent, and paid Demosthenes interest on the fruit of his bribery at the rate of a drachma per month on the mina,48 until they paid off the principal.
This was done by vote of the people. To prove that what I am telling you is true, please take the decree of the people of Oreus.“Decree”
This is the decree, fellow citizens, a disgrace to our city, no slight exposure of Demosthenes' policies, and a clear accusation against Ctesiphon as well. For the man who so shamelessly received bribes cannot have been the good man that Ctesiphon has dared to set forth.
I come now to the third period, or rather to that bitterest period of all, in which Demosthenes brought ruin upon our state and upon all Hellas by his impiety toward the shrine at Delphi, and by moving the alliance with Thebes—an unjust alliance and utterly unequal. But I will begin with his sins against the the gods.
There is, fellow citizens, a plain, called the plain of Cirrha, and a harbor, now known as “dedicate and accursed.” This district was once inhabited by the Cirrhaeans and the Cragalidae, most lawless tribes, who repeatedly committed sacrilege against the shrine at Delphi and the votive offerings there, and who transgressed against the Amphictyons also. This conduct exasperated all the Amphictyons, and your ancestors most of all, it is said, and they sought at the shrine of the god an oracle to tell them with what penalty they should visit these men.
The Pythia replied that they must fight against the Cirrhaeans and the Cragalidae day and night, bitterly ravage their country, enslave the inhabitants, and dedicate the land to the Pythian Apollo and Artemis and Leto and Athena Pronaea,49 that for the future it lie entirely uncultivated; that they must not till this land themselves nor permit another.
Now when they had received this oracle, the Amphictyons voted, on motion of Solon of Athens, a man able as a law-giver and versed in poetry and philosophy, to march against the accursed men according to the oracle of the god.
Collecting a great force of the Amphictyons, they enslaved the men, destroyed their harbor and city, and dedicated their land, as the oracle had commanded. Moreover they swore a mighty oath, that they would not themselves till the sacred land nor let another till it, but that they would go to the aid of the god and the sacred land with hand and foot and voice, and all their might.
They were not content with taking this oath, but they added an imprecation and a mighty curse concerning this; for it stands thus written in the curse : “If any one should violate this,” it says, “whether city or private man, or tribe, let them be under the curse,” it says, “of Apollo and Artemis and Leto and Athena Pronaea.”
The curse goes on: That their land bear no fruit; that their wives bear children not like those who begat them, but monsters; that their flocks yield not their natural increase; that defeat await them in camp and court and market-place, and that they perish utterly, themselves, their houses, their whole race; “And never,” it says, “may they offer pure sacrifice unto Apollo, nor to Artemis, nor to Leto, nor to Athena Pronaea, and may the gods refuse to accept their offerings.”
As a proof of this, let the oracle of the god be read; hear the curse; call to mind the oaths that your fathers swore together with all the other Amphictyons.“Oracle[Ye may not hope to capture town nor tower, Till dark-eyed Amphitrite's waves shall break And roar against Apollo's sacred shore.]50 ”Paus. 10.7.6“Oaths”“Curse”
This curse, these oaths, and this oracle stand recorded to this day; yet the Locrians of Amphissa, or rather their leaders, most lawless of men, did till the plain, and they rebuilt the walls of the harbor that was dedicate and accursed, and settled there and collected port-dues from those who sailed into the harbor and of the deputies51 who came to Delphi they corrupted some with money, one of whom was Demosthenes.
For after he had been elected your deputy,52 he received two thousand drachmas from the Amphissians, in return for which he was to see that no mention of them should he made in the assembly of the Amphictyons. And it was agreed with him that thereafter twenty minas of the accursed and abominable money should he sent to Athens to him yearly, on condition that he at Athens aid the Amphissians in every way. In consequence of this it has come to pass even more than before, that whatsoever he touches, be it private citizen, or ruler, or democratic state, becomes entangled, every one, in irreparable misfortune.
Now behold how providence and fortune triumphed over the impiety of the Amphissians. It was in the archonship of Theophrastus;53 Diognetus of Anaphlystus was our hieromnemon; as pylagori54 you elected Meidias of Anagyrus, whom you all remember—I wish for many reasons he were still living55—and Thrasycles of Oeum; I was the third. But it happened that we were no sooner come to Delphi than Diognetus, the hieromnemon, fell sick with fever; the same misfortune had befallen Meidias already.
The other Amphictyons took their seats. Now it was reported to us by one and another who wished to show friendship to our city, that the Amphissians, who were at that time dominated by the Thebans and were their abject servants, were in the act of bringing in a resolution against our city, to the effect that the people of Athens be fined fifty talents, because we had affixed gilded shields to the new temple and dedicated them before the temple had been consecrated, and had written the appropriate inscription, “The Athenians, from the Medes and Thebans when they fought against Hellas.”56
The hieromnemon sent for me and asked me to go into the council and speak to the Amphictyons in behalf of our city—indeed I had already determined of myself so to do.
When I had entered the council, perhaps a little too impetuously—the other pylagori had withdrawn57—and when I was just beginning to speak, one of the Amphissians, a scurrilous fellow, and, as I plainly saw, a man of no education whatever, but perhaps also led on to folly by some divine visitation, cried out, “O Greeks, if you were in your right mind, you would not have so much as named the name of the people of Athens in these sacred days, hut you would have debarred them from the shrine, as men polluted.”
And at the same time he reminded them of your alliance with the Phocians, proposed by that man whom we used to call “Top-knot”;58 and he went through a long list of vexatious charges against our city, which angered me almost beyond endurance as I listened to them then, and which it is no pleasure to recall now. For as I listened, I was exasperated as never before in my life.
I will pass over the rest of what I said, but this occurred to me, to call attention to the impiety of the Amphissians in relation to the sacred land; and from the very spot where I was standing I pointed it out to the Amphictyons for the plain of Cirrha lies just below the shrine and is clearly visible.
“You see,” I said, “O Amphictyons, the plain yonder tilled by the Amphissians, and pottery works and farm buildings erected there. You see with your own eyes the dedicated and accursed harbor walled again. You know of your own knowledge, and have no need of other witness, how these men have farmed out port-dues, and how they are making money from the sacred harbor.” At the same time I called for the reading of the oracle of the god, the oath of our fathers, and the curse that was proclaimed. And I made this declaration:
“I, in behalf of the people of Athens, in my own behalf, and in behalf of my children and my house, do come to the help of the god and the sacred land according unto the oath, with hand and foot and voice, and all my powers and I purge our city of this impiety. As for you, now make your own decision. The sacred baskets are prepared; the sacrificial victims stand ready at the altars and you are about to pray to the gods for blessings on state and hearth.
Consider then with what voice, with what spirit, with what countenance, possessed of what effrontery, you will make your supplications, if you let go unpunished these men, who stand under the ban of the curse. For not in riddles, but plainly is written the penalty to be suffered by those who have been guilty of impiety, and for those who have permitted it; and the curse closes with these words: ‘May they who fail to punish them never offer pure sacrifice unto Apollo, nor to Artemis, nor to Leto, nor to Athena Pronaea, and may the gods refuse to accept their offerings.’”
These words I spoke, and many more. And when now I had finished and gone out from the council, there was great outcry and excitement among the Amphictyons, and nothing more was said about the shields that we had dedicated, but from now on the subject was the punishment of the Amphissians. As it was already late in the day, the herald came forward and made proclamation that all the men of Delphi who were of full age, slaves and free men alike, should come at daybreak on the morrow with shovels and mattocks to the place that is there called the Thyteion. And again the same herald proclaimed that all the hieromnemons and the pylagori should come to the same place to the aid of the god and the sacred land; “And whatever city shall fail to appear, shall he debarred from the shrine and shall be impure and under the curse.
The next morning we came to the designated spot, and descended to the Cirrhaean plain. And when we had despoiled the harbor and burned down the houses, we set out to return. But meanwhile the Locrians of Amphissa, who lived sixty stadia from Delphi, came against us, armed and in full force; and it was only by running that we barely got back to Delphi in safety, for we were in peril of our lives.
Now on the next day Cottyphus, the presiding officer, called an “assembly” of the Amphictyons （they call it an “assembly” when not only the pylagori and hieromnemons are called together,but with them those who are sacrificing and consulting the god）. Then immediately one charge after another was brought against the Amphissians, and our city was much praised. As the outcome of all that was said,they voted that before the next Pylaea59 the hieromnemons should assemble at Thermopylae at a time designated, bringing with them a resolution for the punishment of the Amphissians for their sins against the god and the sacred land and the Amphictyons. As proof of what I say, the clerk shall read the decree to you.“Decree”
Now when we had reported this decree to our senate, and then to the assembly, and when the people had approved our acts, and the whole city was ready to choose the righteous course, and when Demosthenes had spoken in opposition—he was earning his retaining-fee from Amphissa—and when I had clearly convicted him in your presence, thereupon the fellow, unable to frustrate the city by open means, goes into the senate chamber, expels all listeners, and from the secret session brings out a bill to the assembly, taking advantage of the inexperience of the man who made the motion.60
And he managed to have this same bill put to vote in the assembly and passed by the people, at the moment when the assembly was on the point of adjourning, when I had already left the place—for I would never have allowed it—and when most of the people had dispersed. Now the substance of the bill was this: “The hieromnemon of the Athenians,” it says, “and the pylagori who are at the time in office, shall go to Thermopylae and Delphi at the times appointed by our fathers”; fine in sound, shameful in fact; for it prevents attendance on the special meeting at Thermopylae, which had to be held before the date of the regular meeting.
Again in the same decree he writes much more explicitly and malignantly; “The hieromnemon of the Athenians,” he says, “and the pylagori who are at the time in office, shall take no part with those assembled there, in word or deed or decree, or in any act whatsoever.” But what does it mean to “take no part”? Shall I tell you the truth, or what is most agreeable for your ears? I will tell you the truth, for it is the universal habit of speaking to please you that has brought the city to such a pass. It means that you are forbidden to remember the oaths which our fathers swore, or the curse, or the oracle of the god.
And so, fellow citizens, we stayed at home because of this decree, while the other Amphictyons assembled at Thermopylae—all but one city, whose name I would not mention; I pray that misfortune like unto hers may come upon no city of Hellas.61 And when they were assembled they voted to march against the Amphissians. As general they chose Cottyphus of Pharsalus, who was at the time president of the Amphictyons. Philip was not in Macedonia at that time, nor in Hellas, but in Scythia—so far away as that! And yet presently Demosthenes will dare to say that it was I who brought him against Hellas!
Now when they had come through the pass62 in the first expedition, they dealt very leniently with the Amphissians, for as penalty for their monstrous crimes, they laid a money fine upon them, and ordered them to pay it at the temple within a stated time; and they removed the wicked men who were responsible for what had been done, and restored others, whose piety had forced them into exile. But when the Amphissians failed to pay the money to the god, and had restored the guilty men, and banished those righteous men who had been restored by the Amphictyons, under these circumstances at last the second campaign was made, a long time afterward, when Philip had now returned from his Scythian expedition. It was to us that the gods had offered the leadership in the deed of piety, but Demosthenes' taking of bribes had prevented us.
But did not the gods forewarn us, did they not admonish us, to be on our guard, all but speaking with human voice? No city have I ever seen offered more constant protection by the gods, but more inevitably ruined by certain of its politicians. Was not that portent sufficient which appeared at the Mysteries—the death of the celebrants?63 In view of this did not Ameiniades warn you to be on your guard, and to send messengers to Delphi to inquire of the god what was to he done? And did not Demosthenes oppose, and say that the Pythia had gone over to Philip? Boor that he was, gorged with his feast of indulgence from you!
And did he not at last from smouldering and ill-omened sacrifices send forth our troops into manifest danger? And yet it was but yesterday that he dared to assert that the reason why Philip did not advance against our country64 was that the omens were not favorable to him. What punishment, then, do you deserve, you curse of Hellas! For if the conqueror refrained from entering the land of the conquered because the omens were not favorable to him, whereas you, ignorant of the future, sent out our troops before the omens were propitious, ought you to be receiving a crown for the misfortunes of the city, or to have been thrust already beyond her borders?
Wherefore what is there, strange and unexpected, that has not happened in our time!65 For it is not the life of men we have lived, but we were born to be a tale of wonder to posterity. Is not the king of the Persians—he who channelled Athos, he who bridged the Hellespont, he who demanded earth and water of the Greeks, he who dared to write in his letters that he was lord of all men from the rising of the sun unto its setting—is he not struggling now, no longer for lordship over others, but already for his life?66 And do we not see this glory and the leadership against the Persians bestowed on the same men who liberated the temple of Delphi?
But Thebes! Thebes, our neighbor, has in one day been swept from the midst of Hellas—even though justly, for her main policy was wrong, yet possessed by an infatuate blindness and folly that were not of men, but a divine visitation. And the wretched Lacedaemonians, who barely touched these acts at their beginning in connection with the seizure of the temple,67 they who once claimed the right to lead the Greeks, are now about to be sent to Alexander to serve as hostages, and to make an exhibition of their misfortunes68—destined, themselves and their country, to suffer whatever may please him; their fate dependent on the mercy of the man who has conquered them after receiving unprovoked injury at their hands.
And our city, the common refuge of the Greeks, to which in former days used to come the embassies of all Hellas, each city in turn to find safety with us, our city is now no longer contending for the leadership of Hellas, but from this time on for the soil of the fatherland. And this has come upon us from the time when Demosthenes came into political leadership. Well does the poet Hesiod speak concerning such men; for he says somewhere, instructing the people and advising the cities not to take to themselves corrupt politicians—but I will myself recite the verses;
for this is the reason, I think, that in our childhood we commit to memory the sentiments of the poets, that when we are men we may make use of them:
“Ofttimes whole peoples suffer from one man, Whose deeds are sinful, and whose purpose base. From heaven Cromon launches on their heads Dire woe of plague and famine joined; and all The people waste away. Or else he smites Their wide-camped host, or wall. Or wrath of Zeus Far-thundering wrecks their ships upon the sea. 69” Hes. WD 240
If you disregard the poet's meter and examine only his thought, I think this will seem to you to be, not a poem of Hesiod, but an oracle directed against the politics of Demosthenes. For by his politics army and navy and peoples have been utterly destroyed.
I think that not Phrynondas and not Eurybatus, nor any other of the traitors of ancient times ever proved himself such a juggler and cheat as this man, who, oh earth and heaven, oh ye gods and men—if any men of you will listen to the truth—dares to look you in the face and say that Thebes actually made the alliance with you, not because of the crisis, not because of the fear that was impending over them, not because of your reputation, but because of Demosthenes' declamations!
And yet in other days many men who had stood in the closest relations with the Thebans had gone on missions to them; first, Thrasymachus of Collytus, a man trusted in Thebes as no other ever was; again, Thrason of Erchia, proxenus of the Thebans;
Leodamas of Acharnae, a speaker no less able than Demosthenes, and more to my taste; Archedemus of Pelekes, a powerful speaker, and one who had met many political dangers for the sake of the Thebans; Aristophon of Azenia, who had long been subject to the charge of having gone over to the Boeotians; Pyrrhandrus of Anaphlystus, who is still living. Yet no one of these was ever able to persuade them to be friends with you. And I know the reason, but because of the present misfortune of Thebes, I have no desire to speak it.70
But, I think, when Philip had taken Nicaea71 from them and given it to the Thessalians, and when he was now bringing back again upon Thebes herself through Phocis the same war that he had formerly driven from the borders of Boeotia,72 and when finally he had seized Elateia and fortified and garrisoned it,73 then, and not till then, it was, when the peril was laying hold on them, that they sent for the Athenians. You went out and were on the point of marching into Thebes under arms, horse and foot, before ever Demosthenes had moved one single syllable about an alliance.
What brought you into Thebes was the crisis and fear and need of alliance, not Demosthenes.
For in this whole affair Demosthenes is responsible to you for three most serious mistakes. The first was this: when Philip was nominally making war against you, but really was far more the enemy of Thebes, as the event itself has proved （why need I say more?）, Demosthenes concealed these facts, which were so important, and pretending that the alliance was to be brought about, not through the crisis, but through his own negotiations,
first he persuaded the people to give up all consideration of the terms of the alliance, and to count themselves fortunate if only it were made; and when he had gained this point he betrayed all Boeotia to the Thebans by writing in the decree, “If any city refuse to follow Thebes, the Athenians shall aid the Boeotians in Thebes,”74 cheating with words and altering the facts, as he is wont to do; as though, forsooth, when the Boeotians should be suffering in fact, they would be content with Demosthenes' fine phrases, rather than indignant at the outrageous way in which they had been treated;
and, secondly, he laid two thirds of the costs of the war upon you, whose danger was more remote, and only one third on the Thebans （in all this acting for bribes）; and the leadership by sea he caused to be shared equally by both; but all the expenditure he laid upon you and the leadership by land, if we are not to talk nonsense, he carried away bodily and handed it over to Thebes. The result was that in all the war that followed, Stratocles, your general, had no authority to plan for the safety of his troops.
And it is not true that in this I alone accuse, while others are silent; nay, I speak, all men blame him, you know the facts—and are not angry! For this is your experience as regards Demosthenes: you have so long been accustomed to hear of his crimes that they no longer surprise you. But it ought not so to be; you ought to be indignant, and to punish him, if the city is to prosper in the future.
But he was guilty of a second and far greater crime; for he stole the senate-house of the city and the democracy outright and carried them off to Thebes, to the Cadmeia, by his agreement with the Boeotarchs for joint control. And he contrived such domination for himself that now he came forward to the platform and declared that he was going as ambassador wherever he chose, whether you sent him or not;
and, treating your magistrates as his slaves, and teaching them to raise no word of opposition against him, he declared that if any of the generals should oppose him,75 he would bring suit to settle the claims of the speakers' platform as against those of the war office; for he said you owed more benefits to him from the platform than to the generals from the war office. And by drawing pay for empty places in the mercenary force,76 by stealing the pay of the troops, and by hiring out those ten thousand mercenaries to the Amphissians77 against my repeated protests and complaints in the assembly—when the mercenaries had thus been carried off, he rushed the city all unprepared into the mist of peril.
What, think you, would Philip have prayed for at that crisis? Would it not have been that he might in one place fight against the city's forces, and in another, in Amphissa, against the mercenaries, and thus close his hand upon the Greeks already discouraged by so great a disaster? And Demosthenes, who is responsible for such misfortunes as that, is not content with escaping punishment, but is miserable unless he shall he crowned with a golden crown! Nor is he satisfied that the crown shall be announced in your presence, but if it is not to he proclaimed before the Hellenes, he is miserable over that. So true it seems to be that a wicked nature, when it has laid hold on great license, works out public disaster.
But the third and greatest of the crimes that I have mentioned is that which I am about to describe. Philip did not despise the Greeks, and he was well aware （for he was not without understanding） that he was about to contend in a little fraction of a day for all that he possessed; for that reason he wished to make peace, and was on the point of sending envoys. The officials at Thebes also were frightened at the impending danger—naturally, for they had no run-away orator and deserter to advise them, but the ten years' Phocian war had taught them a lesson not to be forgotten.
Now when Demosthenes saw that such was the situation, suspecting that the Boeotarchs were about to conclude a separate peace and get gold from Philip without his being in it, and thinking that life was not worth living if he was to be left out of any act of bribery, he jumped up in the assembly, when no man was saying a word either in favour of making peace with Philip or against it; and with the idea of serving a sort of notice on the Boeotarchs that they must turn over to him his share of the gain, he swore by Athena
（whose statue, it seems, Pheidias wrought expressly that Demosthenes might have it to perjure himself by and to make profit of） that if any one should say that we ought to make peace with Philip, he would seize him by the hair and drag him to prison—in this imitating the politics of Cleophon, who, they tell us, in the time of the war against the Lacedaemonians, brought ruin to the state. But when the officials in Thebes would pay no attention to him, but even turned your soldiers back again when they had marched out, for they wished to give you an opportunity to deliberate concerning peace,
then indeed he became frantic, and went forward to the platform and stigmatized the Boeotarchs as traitors to Hellas, and declared that he would move a decree—he, who never looked on the face of an enemy in arms !—that you should send ambassadors to Thebes to ask them to give you free passage through their country for the march against Philip. But the officials in Thebes, ashamed lest they should seem in reality to be traitors to Hellas, turned from the thought of peace, and threw themselves into the war.
Here indeed it is fitting that we should pay the tribute of memory to those brave men whom he, regardless of the smouldering and ill-omened sacrifices, sent forth into manifest danger—he who, when they had fallen, dared to set his cowardly and runaway feet upon their tomb and eulogize the valor of the dead.78 O man of all mankind most useless for great and serious deeds, but for boldness of words most wonderful, will you presently undertake to look this jury in the face and say that over the disasters of the city you must be crowned? And, gentlemen, if he does, will you endure it? Are we to believe that you and your memory are to die with the dead?
I ask you to imagine for a little time that you are not in the court-room, but in the theater, and to imagine that you see the herald coming forward to make the proclamation under the decree; consider whether you believe the relatives of the dead will shed more tears over the tragedies and the sufferings of the heroes soon afterward to be presented on the stage, or over the blindness of the city.
For what Greek, nurtured in freedom, would not mourn as he sat in the theater and recalled this, if nothing more, that once on this day, when as now the tragedies were about to be performed, in a time when the city had better customs and followed better leaders, the herald would come forward and place before you the orphans whose fathers had died in battle, young men clad in the panoply of war; and he would utter that proclamation so honorable and so incentive to valor; “These young men, whose fathers showed themselves brave men and died in war, have been supported by the state until they have come of age and now, clad thus in full armour by their fellow citizens, they are sent out with the prayers of the city, to go each his way and they are invited to seats of honor in the theater.”
This was the proclamation then, but not today. For when the herald has led forward the man who is responsible for making the children orphans, what will he proclaim? What words will he utter? For if he shall recite the mere dictates of the decree, yet the truth, ashamed, will refuse to be silent, and we shall seem to hear it crying out in words which contradict the voice of the herald, “This man, if man he can be called, the Athenian people crown, the basest— ‘for his virtue’ and ‘for his nobility‘—the coward and deserter.”
No! by Zeus and the gods, do not, my fellow citizens, do not, I beseech you, set up in the orchestra of Dionysus a memorial of your own defeat; do not in the presence of the Greeks convict the Athenian people of having lost their reason; do not remind the poor Thebans of their incurable and irreparable disasters, men who, exiled through Demosthenes' acts, found refuge with you, when their shrines and children and tombs had been destroyed by Demosthenes' taking of bribes and by the Persian gold.79
But since you were not present in person, yet in imagination behold their disaster; imagine that you see their city taken, the razing of their walls, the burning of their homes; their women and children led into captivity; their old men, their aged matrons, late in life learning to forget what freedom means; weeping, supplicating you, angry not so much at those who are taking vengeance upon them, as at the men who are responsible for it all and calling on you by no means to crown the curse of Hellas, but rather to guard yourselves against the evil genius and the fate that ever pursue the man.
For there is no city, there is no private man—not one—that has ever come off safe after following Demosthenes' counsel. You have passed a law, fellow citizens, governing the men who steer the boats across the strait to Salamis; if one of them by accident overturns a boat in the strait, your law permits him no longer to be a ferryman, in order that no man may be careless of Greek lives; are you not then ashamed if this man, who has utterly overturned the city and all Hellas, if this man is to be permitted again to pilot the ship of state?
But that I may speak concerning the fourth period also, and the present situation, I wish to remind you of this fact, that Demosthenes not only deserted his post in the army, but his post in the city also; for he took possession of one of your triremes and levied money upon the Greeks.80 But when our unexpected safety81 had brought him hack to the city, during the first months the man was timid, and he came forward half-dead to the platform and urged you to elect him “preserver of the peace.” But as for you, you would not even let resolutions that were passed bear the name of Demosthenes as the mover, but gave that honor to Nausicles. And yet, to-day, here is Demosthenes actually demanding a crown!
But when Philip was dead and Alexander had come to the throne, Demosthenes again put on prodigious airs and caused a shrine to he dedicated to Pausanias82 and involved the senate in the charge of having offered sacrifice of thanksgiving as for good news. And he nicknamed Alexander “Margites”;83 and had the effrontery to say that Alexander would never stir out of Macedonia, for he was content, he said, to saunter around84 in Pella, and keep watch over the omens; and he said this statement was not based on conjecture, but on accurate knowledge, for valor was to be purchased at the price of blood. For Demosthenes, having no blood himself, formed his judgment of Alexander, not from Alexander's nature, but from his own cowardice.
But when now the Thessalians had voted to march against our city, and the young Alexander was at first bitterly angry—naturally85—and when the army was near Thebes, Demosthenes, who had been elected ambassador by you, turned back when halfway across Cithaeron and came running home—useless in peace and war alike! And worst of all: while you did not surrender him86 nor allow him to be brought to trial in the synod of the Greeks, he has betrayed you now, if current report is true.
For, as the people of the Paralus say,87 and those who have been ambassadors to Alexander—and the story is sufficiently credible—there is one Aristion, a man of Plataean status,88 son of Aristobulus the apothecary, known perhaps to some of you. This young man, distinguished for extraordinary beauty of person, once lived a long time in Demosthenes' house （what he used to do there or what was done to him, is a scandal that is in dispute, and the story is one that would be quite improper for me to repeat）. Now I am told that this Aristion, his origin and personal history being unknown to the king, is worming himself into favour with Alexander and getting access to him. Through him Demosthenes has sent a letter to Alexander, and has secured a certain degree of immunity for himself, and reconciliation; and he has carried his flattery to great lengths.
But see from the following how the facts tally with the charge. For if Demosthenes had been bent on war with Alexander, as he claims to have been, or had any thought of it, three of the best opportunities in the world have been offered to him, and, as you see, he has not seized one of them. One, the first, was when Alexander, newly come to the throne, and not yet fairly settled in his personal affairs, crossed into Asia. The king of Persia was at the height of his power then, with ships and money and troops,and he would gladly have received us into his alliance because of the dangers that were threatening him. But did you, Demosthenes, at that time say a word? Did you move a decree? Shall I assume that you followed your natural disposition and were frightened? And yet the public opportunity waits not for the orator's fears.
But when Darius was come down to the coast89 with all his forces, and Alexander was shut up in Cilicia in extreme want, as you yourself said, and was, according to your statement, on the point of being trampled under the hoofs of the Persian horse, and when there was not room enough in the city to contain your odious demonstrations and the letters that you carried around, dangling them from your fingers, while you pointed to my face as showing my discouragement and consternation, and in anticipation of some mishap to Alexander you called me “gilded horn,” and said the garland was already on my head,90 not even then did you take one step, but deferred it all for some more favorable opportunity.
But I will pass over all this, and speak of the most recent events. The Lacedaemonians and their mercenary force had been successful in battle and had destroyed the forces of Corrhagus;91 the Eleans and the Achaeans, all but the people of Pellene, had come over to them, and so had all Arcadia except Megalopolis, and that city was under siege and its capture was daily expected. Meanwhile Alexander had withdrawn to the uttermost regions of the North, almost beyond the borders of the inhabited world, and Antipater was slow in collecting an army; the whole outcome was uncertain. Pray set forth to us, Demosthenes, what in the world there was that you did then, or what in the world there was that you said. I will yield the platform to you, if you wish, until you have told us.
You are silent. I can well understand your embarrassment. But what you said then, I myself will tell now. Do you not remember, gentlemen, his disgusting and incredible words? Ye men of iron, how had you ever the endurance to listen to them! When he came forward and said, “Certain men are pruning the city, certain men have trimmed off the tendrils of the people, the sinews of the state have been cut, we are being matted and sewed up, certain men are first drawing us like needles into tight places.”
What are these things, you beast? Are they words or monstrosities? And again when you whirled around in a circle on the platform and said, pretending that you were working against Alexander, “I admit that I organized the Laconian uprising, I admit that I am bringing about the revolt of the Thessalians and the Perrhaebi.” You cause a revolt of the Thessalians? What! Could you cause the revolt of a village? Would you actually approach—let us talk not about a city—would you actually approach a house, where there was danger? But if money is being paid out anywhere, you will lay siege to the place; a man's deed you will never do. If any good-fortune come of itself, you will lay claim to it, and sign your name to the thing after it has been done; but if any danger approach, you will run away; and then if we regain confidence, you will call for rewards and crowns of gold.
Yes, but he is a friend of the people! If now you attend only to the plausible sound of his words, you will be deceived as in the past; but if you look at his character and the truth, you will not be deceived. Call him to account in this way: with your help I will reckon up what ought to be the inborn qualities of the “friend of the people” and the orderly citizen; and over against them I will set down what manner of man one would expect the oligarch and the worthless man to be. And I ask you to compare the two and to see to which class he belongs—not by his professions, but by his life.
I think you would all acknowledge that the following qualities ought to he found in the “friend of the people”: in the first place, he should be free-born, on both his father's and his mother's side, lest because of misfortune of birth he be disloyal to the laws that preserve the democracy. In the second place, he should have as a legacy from his ancestors some service which they have done to the democracy, or at the very least there must he no inherited enmity against it, lest in the attempt to avenge the misfortunes of his family he undertake to injure the city.
Thirdly, he ought to be temperate and self-restrained in his daily life, lest to support his wanton extravagance he take bribes against the people. Fourthly, he ought to be a man of good judgment and an able speaker; for it is well that his discernment choose the wisest course, and his training in rhetoric and his eloquence persuade the hearers; but if he cannot have both, good judgment is always to be preferred to eloquence of speech. Fifthly, he ought to be a man of brave heart, that in danger and peril he may not desert the people. But the oligarch we should expect to have all the opposite qualities; why need I go over them again? Examine, then, and see what one of these qualities belongs to Demosthenes. And let the reckoning be made with all fairness.
His father was Demosthenes of Paeania, a free man, for there is no need of lying. But how the case stands as to his inheritance from his mother and his maternal grandfather, I will tell you. There was a certain Gylon of Cerameis. This man betrayed Nymphaeum in the Pontus to the enemy, for the place at that time belonged to our city.92 He was impeached and became an exile from the city, not awaiting trial. He came to Bosporus93 and there received as a present from the tyrants of the land a place called “the Gardens.”
Here he married a woman who was rich, I grant you, and brought him a big dowry, but a Scythian by blood. This wife bore him two daughters, whom he sent hither with plenty of money. One he married to a man whom I will not name—for I do not care to incur the enmity of many persons,—the other, in contempt of the laws of the city,94 Demosthenes of Paeania took to wife. She it was who bore your busy-body and informer. From his grandfather, therefore, he would inherit enmity toward the people, for you condemned his ancestors to death and by his mother's blood he would be a Scythian, a Greek-tongued barbarian—so that his knavery, too, is no product of our soil.
But in daily life what is he? From being a trierarch he suddenly came forward as a hired writer of speeches,95 when he had disreputably squandered his patrimony. But when he had lost his reputation even in this profession, for he disclosed his clients' arguments to their opponents, he vaulted on to the political platform. And though he made enormous profits out of politics, he laid up next to nothing. It is true that just now the Persian's gold has floated his extravagance, but even that will not suffice, for no wealth ever yet kept up with a debauched character. And to sum it all up, he supplies his wants, not from his private income, but from your perils.
But as regards good judgment and power of speech, how does it stand with him? Eloquent of speech, infamous of life! For so licentious has been his treatment of his own body that I prefer not to describe his conduct; for before now I have seen people hated who recount too exactly the sins of their neighbors. Then again, what is the outcome for the city? His words are fine, his acts worthless.
But as concerns his bravery little remains for me to say. For if he denied that he is a coward, or if you did not know it as well as he does himself, the account of it would have detained me. But since he admits it himself in the assembly, and you are perfectly aware of it, it remains only to remind you of the laws as to this matter. For Solon, the ancient lawgiver, thought it necessary to apply the same penalties to the coward as to the man who failed to take the field or the man who deserted his post. For there are such things as indictments for cowardice. Some of you may indeed be surprised to know that there are indictments for inborn defects. There are. To what end? In order that each man of us, fearing the punishment of the laws more than he fears the enemy, may become a better champion of his country.
Therefore the man who fails to take the field, and the coward, and the man who has deserted his post are excluded by the lawgiver from the purified precincts of the Agora, and may not be crowned, nor take part in the sacred rites of the people. But you, Ctesiphon, command us to crown the man who by command of the laws is uncrowned; and by your decree you invite into the orchestra at the time of the tragedies the man who has no right to enter, and into the shrine of Dionysus the man who has betrayed all our shrines through cowardice.
But that I may not lead you away from the subject, remember this when he says that he is the “friend of the people”; examine, not his speech, but his life; and consider, not who he says he is, but who he is.
I have mentioned crowns and rewards. Let me, fellow citizens, while I still have the matter in mind, warn you that unless you put a stop to these prodigal gifts and these crowns thoughtlessly bestowed, neither those who receive honors from you will be grateful, nor will the prosperity of the city be restored. For you will never in the world reform those who are bad, and the good you will plunge into extreme discouragement. But I will present proofs which I think will convince you that what I say is true.
If any one should ask you whether our city seems to you more glorious in our own time or in the time of our fathers, you would all agree, in the time of our fathers. And were there better men then than now? Then, eminent men; but now, far inferior. But rewards and crowns and proclamations, and maintenance in the Prytaneum—were these things more common then than now? Then, honors were rare among us, and the name of virtue was itself an honor. But now the custom is already completely faded out, and you do the crowning as a matter of habit, not deliberately.
Are you not therefore surprised, when you look at it in this light, that the rewards are now more numerous, but the city was then more prosperous? And that the men are now inferior, but were better then? I will try to explain this to you. Do you think, fellow citizens, that any man would ever have been willing to train for the pancratium or any other of the harder contests in the Olympic games, or any of the other games that confer a crown, if the crown were given, not to the best man, but to the man who had successfully intrigued for it? No man would ever have been willing.
But as it is, because the reward is rare, I believe, and because of the competition and the honor, and the undying fame that victory brings, men are willing to risk their bodies, and at the cost of the most severe discipline to carry the struggle to the end. Imagine, therefore, that you yourselves are the officials presiding over a contest in political virtue, and consider this, that if you give the prizes to few men and worthy, and in obedience to the laws, you will find many men to compete in virtue's struggle; but if your gifts are compliments to any man who seeks them and to those who intrigue for them, you will corrupt even honest minds.
How true this is, I wish to teach you a little more explicitly. Does it seem to you that Themistocles, who was general when you conquered the Persian in the battle of Salamis, was the better man, or Demosthenes, who the other day deserted his post? Miltiades, who won the battle of Marathon, or yonder man? Further—the men who brought back the exiled democracy from Phyle? And Aristeides “the Just,” a title most unlike the name men give Demosthenes?
But, by the Olympian gods, I think one ought not to name those men on the same day with this monster! Now let Demosthenes show if anywhere stands written an order to crown any one of those men. Was the democracy, then, ungrateful? No, but noble-minded, and those men were worthy of their city. For they thought that their honor should be conferred, not in written words, but in the memory of those whom they had served; and from that time until this day it abides, immortal. But what rewards they did receive, it is well to recall.
There were certain men in those days, fellow citizens, who endured much toil and underwent great dangers at the river Strymon, and conquered the Medes in battle. When they came home they asked the people for a reward, and the democracy gave them great honor, as it was then esteemed—permission to set up three stone Hermae in the Stoa of the Hermae, but on condition that they should not inscribe their own names upon them, in order that the inscription might not seem to be in honor of the generals, but of the people.
That this is true, you shall learn from the verses themselves; for on the first of the Hermae stands written:
““Brave men and daring were they who once by the city of Eion, Far off by Strymon's flood, fought with the sons of the Medes. Fiery famine they made their ally, and Ares on-rushing; So they found helpless a foe stranger till then to defeat.” ” unknown>
and on the second:
““This, the reward of their labour, has Athens bestowed on her leaders; Token of duty well done, honor to valor supreme. Whoso in years yet to be shall read these Ls in the marble, Gladly will toil in his turn, giving his life for the state.” ” unknown
And on the third of the Hermae stands written:
““Once from this city Menestheus, summoned to join the Atreidae, Led forth an army to Troy, plain beloved of the gods. Homer has sung of his fame, and has said that of all the mailed chieftains None could so shrewdly as he marshal the ranks for the fight. Fittingly then shall the people of Athens be honored, and called Marshals and leaders of war, heroes in combat of arms.” ” unknown
Is the name of the generals anywhere here? Nowhere; only the name of the people.
And now pass on in imagination to the Stoa Poecile96; for the memorials of all our noble deeds stand dedicated in the Agora. What is it then, fellow citizens, to which I refer? The battle of Marathon is pictured there. Who then was the general? If you were asked this question you would all answer, “Miltiades.” But his name is not written there. Why? Did he not ask for this reward? He did ask, but the people refused it; and instead of his name they permitted that he should be painted in the front rank, urging on his men.
Again, in the Metroön you may see the reward that you gave to the band from Phyle, who brought the people back from exile. For Archinus of Coele, one of the men who brought back the people, was the author of the resolution. He moved, first, to give them for sacrifice and dedicatory offerings a thousand drachmas, less than ten drachmas per man; then that they be crowned each with a crown of olive （not of gold, for then the crown of olive was prized, but today even a crown of gold is held in disdain）. And not even this will he allow to be done carelessly, but only after careful examination by the Senate, to determine who of them actually stood siege at Phyle when the Lacedaemonians and the Thirty made their attack, not those who deserted their post—as at Chaeroneia—in the face of the advancing enemy. As proof of what I say, the clerk shall read the resolution to you.“Resolution as to the Reward of the Band from Phyle”
Now over against this read the resolution which Ctesiphon has proposed for Demosthenes, the man who is responsible for our greatest disasters.“Resolution”
By this resolution the reward of those who restored the democracy is annulled. If this resolution is good, the other was bad. If they were worthily honored, this man is unworthy of the crown that is proposed.
And yet I am told that he intends to say that I am unfair in holding up his deeds for comparison with those of our fathers. For he will say that Philammon the boxer was crowned at Olympia, not as having defeated Glaucus, that famous man of ancient days, but because he beat the antagonists of his own time;97 as though you did not know that in the case of boxers the contest is of one man against another, but for those who claim a crown, the standard is virtue itself; since it is for this that they are crowned. For the herald must not lie when he makes his proclamation in the theater before the Greeks. Do not, then, recount to us how you have been a better citizen than Pataecion,98 but first attain unto nobility of character, and then call on the people for their grateful acknowledgment.
But lest I lead you away from the subject, the clerk shall read to you the epigram that is inscribed in honor of the band from Phyle, who restored the democracy.
“Epigram“These men, noble of heart, hath the ancient Athenian people Crowned with an olive crown. First were they to oppose Tyrants who knew not the laws, whose rule was the rule of injustice. Danger they met unafraid, pledging their lives to the cause.” ” unknown
Because they put down those who ruled unlawfully, for this cause the poet says they were honored. For then it was still in the ears of all men that the democracy was overthrown only after certain men had put out of the way the provision for the indictment of men who propose illegal measures. Yes, as I have heard my own father say,99 for he lived to be ninety-five years old, and had shared all the toils of the city, which he often described to me in his leisure hours—well, he said that in the early days of the re-established democracy, if any indictment for an illegal motion came into court, the word was as good as the deed.100 For what is more wicked than the man who speaks and does what is unlawful?
And in those days, so my father said, they gave no such hearing as is given now, but the jurors were far more severe toward the authors of illegal motions than was the accuser himself; and it frequently happened that they made the clerk stop, and told him to read to them the laws and the motion a second time; and they convicted a man of making an illegal motion, not in case he had overleaped all the laws together, but if one syllable only was contravened. But the process as it is conducted nowadays is ridiculous. The clerk reads the statement of the illegality which is charged, and the jurors, as though hearing an incantation, or some matter which is no concern of theirs, are attending to something else.
And already as a result of the tricks of Demosthenes you have admitted a shameful custom into your courts; for you have allowed your legal procedure to become perverted: the accuser is on the defensive, and the defendant plays the part of accuser; and the jurors sometimes forget what they are to judge, and are forced to bring in a verdict on matters which were never committed to their decision; while the defendant, if by any chance he does touch on the question at issue, pleads, not that his motion was lawful, but that on some past occasion another man has made an equally unlawful motion and been acquitted; a plea in which I hear Ctesiphon now places great confidence.
Once the famous Aristophon of Azenia dared in your presence to boast that he had been acquitted seventy-five times on charge of making illegal motions. Not so the venerable Cephalus, famous as the truest representative of democracy—not so, but he took pride in the very opposite fact, saying that although he had been the author of more measures than any other man, he had never once been indicted for an illegal motion; an honorable pride, I think. For indictments for illegal motions were in those times brought, not only by political rivals against one another, but by friend against friend, if one was responsible for any error toward the state. Yes, the following shall serve as an illustration:
Archinus of Coele brought an indictment for an illegal motion against Thrasybulus of Steiria, one of his own companions in the return from Phyle; and he convicted him and though his services were recent, the jurors did not take them into account; for they thought that, just as Thrasybulus had brought them back from exile then, so now when they had been restored, by making a motion which was against the laws he was driving them into exile again.
But it is not so today; the very opposite is done. For your worthy generals, and some of those who have received maintenance in the Prytaneum, beg men off who have been indicted for illegal motions.101 But you ought to regard them as ungrateful. For if any man who has been honored in a democracy, a government which owes its safety to the gods and to the laws, dares to aid men who make illegal motions, he is undermining the government from which he received his honors.
But I will tell you what plea is in order from the honest advocate. When an indictment for an illegal motion is tried in court, the day is divided into three parts. The first water is poured in102 for the accuser, the laws, and the democracy the second water, for the defendant and those who speak on the question at issue; but when the question of illegality has been decided by the first ballot,103 then the third water is poured in for the question of the penalty and the extent of your anger.
Whoever therefore in the discussion on the penalty asks for your vote,104 is begging you to mitigate your anger; but he who in the first speech asks for your vote is asking you to surrender your oath, to surrender the law, to surrender the democratic constitution things which no man has a right to ask you to surrender, nor any man to grant another for his asking. Bid them, therefore, to allow you to cast your first ballot according to the laws, before they plead on the question of penalty.
In short, fellow citizens, for my part I am almost ready to say that we ought to pass a special law governing indictments for illegal motions, which shall forbid either accuser or defendant to call in advocates. For the question of right involved is not an indefinite one, but is defined by your own laws. For as in carpentry, when we wish to know what is straight and what is not, we apply the carpenters' rule, which serves as our standard,
so in indictments for illegal motions there lies ready to our hand as a rule of justice this tablet, containing the measure proposed and the laws which it transgresses.105 Show that these agree one with another, Ctesiphon, and then take your seat. Why need you call Demosthenes to your support? When you overleap the just defence and call forward a rascal and a rhetorician, you cheat the ears of the jury, you injure the city, you undermine the democracy.
How you may avert speeches of that sort, fellow citizens, I will tell you. When Ctesiphon comes forward here and recites to you that introduction which has of course been composed for him,106 and when he then tries to kill time, and makes no answer to the charge, suggest to him, quietly, that he take the tablet and read the laws and his resolution side by side. If he pretends that he does not hear you, then do you refuse to hear him. For you have not come here to listen to men who dodge an honest defence, but to those who are willing to defend themselves with justice.
But if he shall overleap the just defence and call Demosthenes to the platform, the best course for you is to refuse to receive a sophist, who expects to overthrow the laws with words. And when Ctesiphon asks you if he shall call Demosthenes, let no man of you consider that he is doing a meritorious thing in being the first to cry, “Aye, call him, call him.” Against yourself you are calling him, against the laws you are calling him, against the constitution you are calling him. But if after all you decide to listen, demand that Demosthenes make his defence in the same way in which I have made the accusation. In what way have I made the accusation? Let me recall it to you.
I did not at the beginning review the private life of Demosthenes, nor did I at the beginning call to mind a single one of his public crimes—though I certainly had great abundance of material, or else I must be the most helpless of mortals—but first I exhibited the laws which forbid crowning men who have not yet rendered their accounts, and then I convicted the orator of having moved to crown Demosthenes before he had rendered account, and that too without inserting the qualifying proviso, “When he shall have rendered account,” but in utter contempt of you and of your laws. And I told you what excuses they would offer for this, which I earnestly pray you to keep in mind.
Secondly, I recited to you the laws which govern proclamations, in which it is expressly forbidden that when one is crowned by the people the proclamation shall be made in any other place than in the assembly. But the politician who is the defendant in this case has not only transgressed the laws, but the time of proclamation, and the place of it; for he orders the proclamation to be made, not in the assembly, but in the theater, not when the Athenian assembly is in session, but when the tragedies are about to he performed. After saying this, I spoke briefly about his private life, but chiefly about his public crimes.
I insist, therefore, that you demand the same order of defence from Demosthenes; first, let him defend himself against the law of accountability, secondly, against the law which governs proclamations, and thirdly, and most important, let him show also that he is not unworthy of the reward. But if he asks you to indulge him as to the order of his speech, and solemnly promises that at the close of his defence he will clear away the matter of illegality, do not yield to him, and do not forget that this is an old trick of the court-room. For he would never of his own choice return to the defence against the illegality but because he has nothing to say which is just, he seeks by the insertion of extraneous matters to plunge you into forgetfulness of the charge.
As, therefore, in gymnastic contests you see the boxers contending with one another for position, so do you for the city's sake fight with him the whole day long for position as regards argument; and do not let him set his feet outside the bounds of the illegality charged, but watch him and lie in wait for him as you listen, drive him into discussion of the illegality, and look out for the twists and turns of his speech.
What, on the other hand, will surely be the result for you if you listen in the way that they propose, I ought now to forewarn you. For the defendant will call to his aid this juggler and cut-purse, a man who has torn the constitution to shreds. This man weeps more readily than other men laugh, and nothing is so easy for him as perjury. And I should not wonder if he should change his tactics and slander the listeners outside the bar, alleging that those whom truth herself has singled out and counted as oligarchs have come to the platform of the prosecution, but all the friends of the people to the platform of the defence.107
Now when he talks like that, in answer to such appeals to faction, make this suggestion to him: “Demosthenes, if the men of Phyle, who brought back the people from exile, had been like you, never had the democracy been reestablished. But as it was, they saved the city out of great disasters, and gave utterance to those words which are the fairest product of enlightened minds, ‘Forgive and forget.’ But as for you, you tear open old sores, and you care more for the words of the moment than for the safety of the state.”
But when, perjurer that he is, he takes refuge in the confidence which you place in oaths, remind him of this, that when a man repeatedly perjures himself, and yet is continually demanding to be believed because of his oaths, one of two things ought to be true, either the gods ought to be new gods, or the hearers not the same.
But in answer to his tears and the straining of his voice when he asks you, “Whither shall I flee, fellow citizens? You have compassed me about, I have not whither to take wings,” suggest to him, “But the Athenian people, Demosthenes, whither shall they flee? What allies have been made ready to receive them? What resources are prepared? What bulwark have you thrown up before the people by your policies? For we all see what provision you have made for yourself. You have left the upper city and the Peiraeus, as it seems, is not so much your home, as an anchorage for you, off the city's coast. And you have provided as means for your cowardly flight, the King's gold and the fruits of your political bribery.”
But, after all, why these tears? Why all this noise? Why this straining of the voice? Is it not Ctesiphon who is the defendant? Is not the suit one in which the penalty is for the jury to determine?108 Is it not true that you are pleading neither for your person nor for your citizenship nor for your property? But what is this anxiety of his about? About crowns of gold and proclamations in the theater—against the laws.
Nay, but if the people gone mad, or forgetful of the existing situation, had actually wished to crown him at a time so unfitting, he ought to have come before the assembly and said, “Fellow citizens, I accept the crown, but I do not approve the time at which the proclamation is to be made. For events which have caused our city to shear her head in mourning are no fitting occasion for my head to receive a crown.” This I think a man would say whose life had been one of genuine virtue.
But the words which you, Demosthenes, will speak, are the natural expression of a worthless scoundrel, with whom virtue is a pretence. One thing at any rate is sure, by Heracles; no one of you will feel any anxiety lest Demosthenes, a man high-spirited and distinguished in war, will, if he fails to receive the meed of valor, go back home and make away with himself—he who so despises honor in your eyes that on this pestilential and accountable109 head of his upon which Ctesiphon, in defiance of all the laws, proposes that you set a crown, he has inflicted a thousand gashes, and he has made money out of his wounds by bringing suit110 for malicious assault. And on one occasion he got such a smashing blow that I imagine he still carries the visible marks of Meidias' knuckles.111 For it is not a head that the creature possesses, but an investment.
Now I wish to speak briefly about Ctesiphon, the author of the motion; and I will pass over the greater part of what might be said, for I should like to test your ability, even when no one cautions you, to discern those men who are utter rascals. I will speak only of what is common to the pair of them, and what I can honestly report to you concerning both. For the opinion that each of them has of the other is true, and the things that each, as he goes about the market-place, says of the other are no falsehoods.
For Ctesiphon says he is not afraid so far as he himself is concerned, since he hopes it will appear that he is but a plain citizen, but that what he does fear is Demosthenes' corruption in his conduct of affairs, and his instability and cowardice. And Demosthenes says that when he looks at his own case only, he is confident, but that he is exceedingly anxious in view of Ctesiphon's wickedness and licentiousness! Well, when men have thus condemned one another, you, the common judges of both, must surely not acquit them of the crimes they charge.
I wish also to caution you in a few words as to the slanders which they will utter against me. For I learn that Demosthenes will say that the city has been greatly benefited by him, but damaged by me and he will bring up against me Philip and Alexander, and the charges connected with them. And he is, as it seems, such a master-craftsman of words that he is not content to bring charges against whatever part I have taken in your political action, or whatever speeches I have delivered,
but he actually attacks the very quietness of my life, and makes my silence an accusation, in order that no topic may be left untouched by his slanders. And he censures my frequenting of the gymnasia with the younger men.112 And at the very beginning of his speech he demurs against this legal process, saying that I instituted the suit, not in behalf of the city, but as a manifesto to Alexander because he hates Demosthenes.113
And, by Zeus, I understand that he proposes to ask me why I denounce his policy as a whole, but did not try to thwart it in detail, and did not prefer charges in the courts: and why I have brought suit at this late day without having steadily attacked his policy. But I have never in the past emulated the habits of Demosthenes, nor am I ashamed of my own, nor would I wish unsaid the words which I have spoken in your presence, nor would I care to live had my public speeches been like his.
As to my silence, Demosthenes, it has been caused by the moderation of my life. For a little money suffices me, and I have no shameful lust for more. Both my silence and my speech are therefore the result of deliberation, not of the impulse of a spendthrift nature. But you, I think, are silent when you have gotten, and bawl aloud after you have spent; and you speak, not when your judgment approves, and not what you wish to speak, but whenever your pay-masters so order. And you are not ashamed of impostures in which you are instantly convicted of falsehood.
For my suit against this motion, which you say I instituted, not in the city's behalf, but as a manifesto to Alexander, was instituted while Philip was still alive, before Alexander had come to the throne, before ever you had had that dream of yours about Pausanias, or ever had conversed with Athena and Hera in the night.114 How then could I have been already making a manifesto to Alexander? Unless, indeed, I and Demosthenes had the same dream!
And you blame me if I come before the people, not constantly, but only at intervals. And you imagine that your bearers fail to detect you in thus making a demand which is no outgrowth of democracy, but borrowed from another form of government. For in oligarchies it is not he who wishes, but he who is in authority, that addresses the people; whereas in democracies he speaks who chooses, and whenever it seems to him good. And the fact that a man speaks only at intervals marks him as a man who takes part in politics because of the call of the hour, and for the common good; whereas to leave no day without its speech, is the mark of a man who is making a trade of it, and talking for pay.
But as to your never having been brought to trial by me, and never having been punished for your crimes—when you take refuge in assertions like that, either you think that your bearers are forgetful, or you are deceiving yourself.
Your impiety in the case of the Amphissians115 and your corruption in the Euboean affair,116 of which you were clearly convicted by me, perhaps you hope the people have forgotten in the lapse of time;
but what length of time could conceal your acts of plunder in the case of the triremes and the trierarchs? For when you had carried constitutional amendments as to the Three Hundred,117 and had persuaded the Athenians to make you Commissioner of the Navy, you were convicted by me of having stolen away trierarchs from sixty-five swift ships,118 making away with a greater naval force of the city than that with which the Athenians once defeated Pollis and the Lacedaemonians at Naxos.119
And by your recriminations you so blocked the punishment which was your due that the danger came, not upon you, the wrong-doer, but upon those who attempted to proceed against you; for in your charges you everlastingly brought forward Alexander and Philip, and complained that certain persons were fettering the opportunities of the city—you who always ruin the opportunity of to-day, and guarantee that of to-morrow. And when at last you were on the point of being impeached by me, did you not contrive the arrest of Anaxinus of Oreus, who was making purchases for Olympias?120
And you twice put to the torture with your own hand and moved to punish with death the same man in whose house you had been entertained at Oreus. The man with whom at the same table you had eaten and drunken and poured libations, the man with whom you had clasped hands in token of friendship and hospitality, that man you put to death! When I convicted you of this in the presence of all Athens, and charged you with being the murderer of your host, you did not deny the impious crime, but gave an answer that called forth a cry of protest from the citizens and all the foreigners who were standing about the assembly. For you said that you held the city's salt as of more importance than the table of your foreign host.
I say nothing of forged letters and the arrest of spies, and torture applied on groundless charges, on your assertion that I with certain persons was seeking a revolution.
Furthermore, he intends, as I learn, to ask me what kind of a physician he would be who should give no advice to his patient in the course of his illness, but after his death should come to the funeral and tell over to the relatives by what course of treatment the man might have been cured.
But, Demosthenes, you fail to ask yourself in turn what kind of a statesman he would be who, having the power to cajole the people, should sell the opportunities for saving the city, and by his calumnies prevent patriots from giving advice; and when he had run away from danger and had entangled the city in misfortunes from which there was no escape, should demand that he be crowned for his virtue, when he had done nothing that was good, but was himself responsible for all the disasters; and should then ask those who had been driven out of public life by his slanders in those critical days when there was still a chance of safety, why they had not prevented his wrong doing;
and should conceal the final fact of all, that after the battle we had no time to attend to punishing you, but were engrossed in negotiations for the safety of the city. But when, not content with having escaped punishment, you were actually calling for rewards, making the city an object of ridicule in the eyes of all Hellas, then I interposed and brought my indictment.
And, by the Olympian gods, of all the things which I understand Demosthenes is going to say, I am most indignant at what I am now about to tell you. For he likens me in natural endowment to the Sirens, saying that it was not charm that the Sirens brought to those who listened to them, but destruction, and that therefore the Siren-song has no good repute; and that in like manner the smooth flow of my speech and my natural ability have proved the ruin of those who have listened to me.121 And yet I think no man in the world is justified in making such a statement about me. It is a shame to accuse a man and not to be able to show the ground for the accusation.
But if the charge really had to be made, it was not for Demosthenes to make it, but for some general who, although he had rendered distinguished services to the state, was not gifted with the power of speech, and for that reason was envious of the natural endowments of his opponents in court, because he knew that he had not the ability to describe one of all the things he had accomplished, but saw in his accuser a man able to set forth to the hearers in all detail how he had himself administered things which had not been done by him at all. But when a man who is made up of words, and those words bitter words and useless—when such a man takes refuge in “simplicity” and “the facts,” who could have patience with him? If you treat him as you might a clarinet, and take out his tongue, you have nothing left!
But for my part I am surprised at you, fellow citizens, and I ask under what possible consideration you could refuse to sustain this indictment. On the ground that Ctesiphon's motion is lawful? Never was a more unlawful motion made. On the ground that he who moved the decree is not the sort of man to be punished? You give up the possibility of calling any man to account for his manner of life, if you let this man go. And is it not vexatious that whereas in former times the orchestra was piled with golden crowns with which the state was honored by the Hellenes,122 today in consequence of the policies of Demosthenes you the people go uncrowned and unproclaimed, but he is to be honored by the voice of the herald?
If any one of the tragic poets who are to bring on their plays after the crowning should in a tragedy represent Thersites as crowned by the Greeks, no one of you would tolerate it, for Homer says he was a coward and a slanderer; but when you yourselves crown such a man as this, think you not that you would be hissed by the voice of Hellas? Your fathers were wont to attribute to the people such deeds as were glorious and brilliant, but mean and unworthy acts they threw upon the incompetent politicians. But Ctesiphon thinks that you ought to take off from Demosthenes his ill-fame, and crown the people with it.
And while you assert that you are favorites of fortune—as indeed you are, thank heaven—will you declare by public resolution that you have been abandoned by fortune, but blessed by Demosthenes? And—strangest of all—in the same court-rooms do you disfranchise those who are convicted of receiving bribes, and then yourselves propose to crown a man who, to your own knowledge, has always been in politics for pay? If the judges at the Dionysiac festival are not honest in their award of the prize to the cyclic choruses, you punish them; but do you yourselves, who are sitting as judges, not of cyclic choruses, but of the laws and of integrity in public life, do you propose to bestow your rewards, not according to the laws, and not upon the rare and deserving, but upon the successful intriguer?
Furthermore, a juror who so acts will go out from the court-room responsible for having made himself weak and the politician strong. For in a democracy the private citizen is a king by virtue of the constitution and his own vote; but when he hands these over to another man, he has by his own act dethroned himself. Still further, the oath that he has sworn before taking his seat haunts him and troubles him, for it was his oath, I think, that made his act a sin; and his service is unknown to the man whom he was trying to please, for the vote is cast in secret.
But it seems to me, fellow citizens, that the political situation, while fortunate, is also perilous; for we are not wise. The fact that at the present time you, the people, give over the mainstays of the democracy to the few is to be deplored; but the fact that there has not sprung up to our hurt a crop of politicians both corrupt and daring is a gift of fortune. For in former times the state did bring forth such characters, and they made short work of putting down the democracy. For the people loved to be flattered, and in consequence were overthrown, not by the men whom they feared, but by those in whose hands they had placed themselves.
And some of them actually joined the Thirty, who killed more than fifteen hundred of the citizens without trial, before they had even heard the charges on which they were to be put to death, and who would not even allow the relatives to be present at the burial of the dead. Will you not hold the politicians under your control? Will you not humble and dismiss those who are now exultant? Will you not bear in mind that in the past no one has ever attempted the overthrow of the democracy until he has made himself stronger than the courts?
But I would like to reckon up in your presence, fellow citizens, with the author of this motion, the benefactions for which he calls on you to crown Demosthenes. For if, Ctesiphon, you propose to cite that which you made the beginning of your motion, that he did good work in excavating the trenches around the walls, I am astonished at you. For to have been responsible for the necessity of doing the work at all involves an accusation greater than is the credit for having done it well. Indeed, it is not for surrounding the walls with palisades, and not for tearing down the public tombs123 that the statesman of clean record ought to ask reward, but for having been responsible for some good to the city.
But if you turn to the second part of your decree, in which you have had the effrontery to write that he is a good man, and “constantly speaks and does what is best for the Athenian people,” omit the pretence and the bombast of your decree, and take hold of the facts, and show us what you mean. I pass by his corruption in the case of the Amphissians and Euboeans; but when you give Demosthenes the credit for the alliance with Thebes, you deceive the ignorant and insult the sensible and well informed. For in failing to mention the crisis and the prestige of these your fellow citizens, which were the real reasons why the alliance was made, you think you prevent our seeing that you are crowning Demosthenes with the credit which belongs to the city.
How great is this imposture, I will try to show you by a signal proof. Not long before Alexander crossed over into Asia, the king of the Persians sent to our people a most insolent and barbarous letter, in which everything was expressed in the most ill-mannered terms; and at the close he wrote, “I will not give you gold; stop asking me for it; you will not get it.”
But this same man, overtaken by the dangers which are now upon him,124 sent, not at the request of the Athenians, but of his own accord, three hundred talents to the people, which they were wise enough to refuse. Now what brought the gold was the crisis, and his fear, and his need of allies. And this same thing it was that brought about the alliance with Thebes. But you, Demosthenes, tire us out with your everlasting talk of Thebes and of that most ill-starred alliance, while you are silent as to the seventy talents of the king's gold which you have seized and embezzled.125
Was it not for lack of money, nay, for lack of five talents, that the mercenaries failed to deliver up the citadel to the Thebans?126 And when all the Arcadians were mobilized and their leaders were ready to bring aid, did not the negotiations fail for want of nine talents of silver?127 But you are a rich man, you serve as choregus128—to your own lusts. In a word, the king's gold stays with Demosthenes, the dangers, fellow citizens, with you.
But we may well consider their lack of good breeding also. For if Ctesiphon shall have the effrontery to call Demosthenes to the platform to speak to you,129 and he to come forward and praise himself, that will be even harder for you to hear than his deeds were to bear. We refuse to listen even to honest men when they speak their own praises, though we know full well how many noble deeds they have done; who, then, could endure to listen when a man who has made himself a disgrace to the city lauds himself?
From such shameless business as that, Ctesiphon, you will therefore withdraw, if you are wise, and make your defence in your own person. For surely you will not put forth this excuse, that you have not the ability to speak. It was only the other day that you allowed yourself to be elected as envoy to Cleopatra, the daughter of Philip, to condole with her over the death of Alexander, king of the Molossians;130 you would then be in a strange position today, if you should say that you have not the ability to speak. Have you, then, the ability to console a foreign woman in her grief, but when you have made a motion for pay, will you not speak in defence of it?
Or is the man whom you have moved to crown so obscure a man as not to be known by those whom he has served, unless some one shall help you to describe him? Pray ask the jury whether they knew Chabrias and Iphicrates and Timotheus, and inquire why they gave them those rewards and set up their statues. All will answer with one voice, that they honored Chabrias for the battle of Naxos, and Iphicrates because he destroyed a regiment of the Lacedaemonians, and Timotheus because of his voyage to Corcyra, and other men, each because of many a glorious deed in war.
But ask them why Demosthenes is to be honored. Because he is a taker of bribes? Because he is a coward? Because he deserted his post? And will you in reality be honoring him, or leaving unavenged yourselves and those who died for you in the battle? In imagination see them expostulating against the crowning of this man. When sticks and stones and iron, voiceless and senseless things, fall on any one and kill him, we cast them beyond the borders,131 and when a man kills himself, the hand that did the deed is buried apart from the body;
how outrageous, then, fellow citizens, if Demosthenes, who made the motion for that final campaign, and then betrayed the soldiers, is to receive honor from you! So are the dead insulted, and the living are disheartened, when they see that death is the prize of valor, while the memory of it fades away. And, most important of all, the younger men inquire of you after what example they ought to shape their lives.
For be assured, fellow citizens, it is not our wrestling halls or the schools or our system of liberal studies alone that educate the young, but far more our public proclamations. It is proclaimed in the theater that one is crowned for virtue and nobility and patriotism, a man whose life is shameful and loathsome; a younger man, at sight of that, is corrupted. A man has been punished who is a rascal and libertine—like Ctesiphon; the rest have received instruction. A juror who has cast his vote against honor and justice goes home and proceeds to instruct his son; the boy refuses to obey, and with good reason, and he is surely justified thenceforth in calling exhortation vexation.
Cast your vote, then, not only as men who are rendering a verdict, but also as men who are in the public eye, to be called to account by the citizens who, though they are not now present, will nevertheless ask you what your verdict was. For be assured, fellow citizens, men will hold the city to be of like character with the man who is proclaimed. And it is a reproach for you to be likened, not to your fathers, but to the cowardice of Demosthenes.
How then could you escape such disgrace?
By guarding against those who arrogate to themselves the name of “patriot” and “benefactor,” but are untrustworthy in character. For loyalty and the name of friend of the people are prizes which are offered to us all, but for the most part those persons are the first to take refuge in them in speech who are farthest from them in conduct.
When, therefore, you find a politician coveting crowns and proclamations in the presence of the Greeks, bid him bring his argument back to the proof of a worthy life and a sound character, precisely as the law commands a man to give security for property.132 But if he has no testimony to this, do not confirm to him the praises which he seeks let your thought be for the democracy, which is already slipping through your hands.
Does it not seem to you to be an outrage if the senate-house and the people are coming to be ignored, while the letters and ambassadors come to private houses, sent hither not by ordinary men, but by the first men of Asia and Europe? And deeds the legal penalty for which is death, these deeds certain men do not deny, but acknowledge them before the people; and they read their letters to one another and compare them. And some of them bid you look into their faces as being guardians of the democracy, and others call for rewards as being saviours of the state.
But the people, discouraged by what they have experienced, as though in very dotage or declared of unsound mind, lay claim only to the name of democracy, and have surrendered the substance to others. And so you go home from the meetings of your assembly, not as from a deliberative session, but as from some picnic, where you have been given the leavings as your share.
To prove that this is not mere talk, consider my statement in the light of the following facts: There came—it pains me to call it to mind repeatedly—there came a certain disaster to the city. At that time a certain private citizen who merely undertook to sail to Samos was on the same day punished with death by the Senate of the Areopagus, as a traitor to his country. Another private citizen, who sailed away to Rhodes, was only the other day prosecuted, because he was a coward in the face of danger. The vote of the jury was a tie, and if a single vote had been changed, he would have been cast outside our borders.133
Now with that let us compare what is taking place today. A politician, the man who is responsible for all our disasters, deserted his post in the field, and then ran away from the city:134 this man is calling for a crown, and he thinks he must be proclaimed. Away with the fellow, the curse of all Hellas! Nay, rather, seize and punish him, the pirate of politics, who sails on his craft of words over the sea of state.
And mark well the occasion on which you are casting your vote. A few days hence the Pythian games are to be celebrated and the synod of Hellas assembled. Our city is already the object of slander in consequence of the policies of Demosthenes in connection with the present critical situation.135 If you crown him, you will seem to be in sympathy with those who violate the general peace, whereas if you do the opposite, you will free the people from these charges.
Deliberate, therefore, not as for some foreign state, but as for your own; treat your honors, not as favours to be bestowed, but as rewards of merit; reserve your crowns for better heads and more worthy men. Deliberate, not with the help of your ears alone, but with your eyes as well, looking sharply among yourselves to see who of your number they are who propose to aid Demosthenes; whether they are comrades of his youth in the hunting-field, or companions in the gymnasium—but no, by the Olympian Zeus, that cannot be, for his time has been spent, not in hunting wild boars, and not in cultivating vigor of body, but in practising his art of hunting down men of property.
Yes, look at his imposture when he says that by his services as envoy he dragged Byzantium from Philip's hands, and caused the revolt of the Acarnanians, and carried the Thebans away by his harangues. For he supposes that you have by this time come to such a pitch of folly that you will credit even this, as though it were the goddess Persuasion that you have been nurturing in your city, and not a slanderer!
But when at last at the close of his speech he calls forward to support his cause the men who have shared his bribes, imagine that on the platform where now I am standing as I speak, you see, drawn up in array against the lawlessness of these men, the benefactors of the state: Solon, who equipped the democracy with the best of laws, a philosopher and a good lawgiver, begging you soberly, as he naturally would, by no means to hold the words of Demosthenes as more weighty than your oaths and the laws;
and that man who assessed the tribute of the Greeks, and whose daughters our people dowered after his death, Aristeides, expressing his indignation at this mockery of justice, and asking you if you are not ashamed that whereas, when Arthmius of Zeleia transported the gold of the Medes into Hellas,136 although he had once resided in our city, and was proxenus of the Athenian people, your fathers were all but ready to kill him, and they warned him out of their city, and out of all the territory under Athenian control,
you now propose to crown with a golden crown Demosthenes, a man who has not indeed “transported” the gold of the Medes, but has received it as a bribe, and keeps it to this day. Think you not that Themistocles and those who died at Marathon and at Plataea, and the very sepulchres of your fathers, will groan aloud, if the man who admits that he has negotiated with the barbarians against the Greeks shall receive a crown?
Be ye my witnesses, O Earth and Sun, and virtue and Conscience, and Education, by which we distinguish the honorable and the base, that I have heard my country's call, and have spoken. If I have presented the accusations well and in a manner commensurate with the crime, I have spoken according to my desire; if insufficiently, according to my ability. It remains for you, fellow citizens, in view both of what has been spoken and what is left unsaid, yourselves to give the verdict that is just and for the city's good.
1 The popular leaders, confident in their ability to carry the popular assembly by appeal to the passions of the masses, bring cases there in the form of impeachments, etc., which ought to go to the courts, to be decided under the laws.
2 See Aeschin. 1.33 and note.
3 It was a principle of the Athenian legal system that litigation arising within the sphere of any executive department should come before a court presided over by the head of that department.
4 All incoming officials were required to pass a formal “scrutiny” （δοκιμασία） before entering upon office. In the case of most officials this was conducted before a court. Aeschines mentions this preliminary scrutiny here because it would naturally follow that any person who had to pass the official scrutiny before entering on his work would have to pass the official accounting on laying it down.
5 An official who caused himself to be adopted into some family poorer than his own might thus diminish the security which the state would hold in case of his misconduct in office.
6 In time of peace all surplus revenue went into the festival fund （τὸ θεωρικόν）, from which donations were made to the citizens on festival days. The fund was administered by an elective board of commissioners.
7 See on Aeschin. 3.14.
8 The spring of 337, nine months after the battle of Chaeronea. Skirophorion was the next month after Thargelion.
9 See on Aeschin. 3.14.
10 A trittys was a third of a tribe and was composed of a group of adjoining demes. The division was recognized for certain administrative purposes.
11 The court for the scrutiny of incoming officers. See on Aeschin. 3.15.
12 The Thesmothetae were the six lower archons. They had general supervision of all the courts, and particular control of numerous specified cases.
13 The regular place for posing many of the public notices was in front of the statues of the ten heroes for whom the tribes were named. The statues stood on the Agora, near the senate-house and the Tholos.
14 The Nomothetae were a special commission, chosen by lot from among the jurors of the year, to whom were referred with power all proposed changes in the fundamental laws （νόμοι） or additions to them.
15 The people having approved the proposition to appoint Homothetae, and that body having been duly constituted, and having heard the arguments on either side, the presiding officer of the Nomothetae finally put to vote the question of the retention of the laws in their old form, or the adoption of the changes proposed （διαχειροτονία）.
16 See Aeschin. 2.93.
17 Meidias was a rich and domineering man,who had conceived a bitter hatred for Demosthenes in the course of the suites against Demosthenes' guardians. When Demosthenes was serving as choregus, Meidias, meeting him in the orchestra, in the presence of the spectators, struck him in the face. The people, at a meeting held in the theater at the close of the festival, passed a vote of censure against Meidias, and Demosthenes instituted a suit in the courts; but finally, probably for worthy political reasons, he compromised the case.
18 In fact, Demosthenes made no such division.
19 The reference is to the unexpected moderation shown by both Philip and Alexander in their treatment of Athens, when they had the city entirely in their power, after her persistent efforts against them.
20 “That former peace” is the Peace of Philocrates, 346 b.c., so distinguished from the peace existing at the time of this speech.
21 In 348 b.c.
22 In Aeschin. 2.14, Aeschines says that Philocrates was ill, and called in Demosthenes as his advocate （συνήγορος）. Probably Philocrates made only a brief and formal answer in court, and left the real defence to Demosthenes.
23 Beginning in midsummer, 347 b.c.
24 The Great Dionysia, April 5th, 346 b.c.
25 The ambassadors who had been sent out to call other Greek states to unite against Philip.
26 It seems that Philip's ambassadors did not arrive in time for the discussion appointed for the 8th; but they were in Athens during at least a part of the Dionysia （Aeschin. 3.76）.
27 At this time Athens was at the head of a small league, all that was left of the great maritime league begun in 378, but largely broken up by the league war of 357—55. It was the synod of this league, sitting at Athens, which passed the resolution cited. The resolution empowered Athens in advance to act in behalf of the league.
28 One of Philip's ambassadors.
29 The presiding officer of the assembly was a senator,chosen by lot for the day.
30 cp. Aeschin. 2.81-86.
31 In the Theater of Dionysus.
32 Charidemus was a mercenary general, then serving Athens in the north.
33 See Aeschin. 3.55.
34 Philocrates was indicted by Hypereides in 343 b.c., and went into exile without standing trial.
35 Demosthenes, in Dem. 18.27, mentions Serrhium, Myrtenus, and Ergisca. Aeschines, in his ridicule of the little places, seems to be making jingles of their names, coining Myrtisca out of Myrtenus, to rhyme with Ergisca, and inventing Ganias to go with Ganus.
36 The anti-Macedonian party refused to accept the island unless Philip would admit that he had been holding it wrongfully, and so was “giving it back,” not giving it” （ἀποδίδωσι—δίδωσιν）.
37 In 357 b.c. two groups of Euboean cities were at war one with the other; one group having called in the Thebans, the other group, led by Eretria, appealed to Athens for help.
38 The expedition of 357 b.c. had brought the pro-Athenian element in Euboea into control; but Philip was now encouraging the anti-Athenian partisans, and supporting the opponents of Plutarchus of Eretria. Plutarchus turned to Athens for help. The date of the expedition is much disputed: Schaefer places it in 350 b.c., Grote in 349, and Weil and Blass in 348.
39 Aeschines speaks from vivid recollection, for he was a member of the expedition. See Aeschin. 2.169.
40 The “comrades” （Ἑταῖροι）, a body of Macedonian nobles, were the calvary guards, the king's corps.
41 This was in 342 b.c.
42 Had the Euboeans come back into the naval alliance （see Aeschin. 3.69, note）, they would have been on the same footing with the other states that wee subordinate to Athens, and would have had to pay their share of the war-fund of the Athenian league. As it was, they came into a special alliance with Athens herself, and as her equals.
43 See Ctesiphon's motion for the crowning of Demosthenes, quoted in Aeschin. 3.49.
44 In the spring of 340 b.c.
45 March 9, 340 b.c.
46 Not the congress of the old maritime league, but of the new confederation now being formed against Macedonia.
47 The contribution that they had formerly paid as members of the maritime league but it was now some years since they had thus contributed.
48 Twelve per cent a year, an ordinary rate of interest.
49 The MSS. read Προνοίᾳ, “Goddess of Forethought.” But undoubtedly the form in the ancient oracle was Προναίᾳ, a name peculiar to the Athena of Delphi, and arising from the fact that there she was the Athena of the “Foretemple” （προ-ναός）, for her temple lay in front of that of Apollo.
50 The oracle given in the MSS. is evidently not the one that Aeschines cited. Some ancient editor has inserted it, finding it in Pausanias' account of these events.
51 See on Aeschin. 3.115.
52 In 343 b.c.
53 340/39 b.c.
54 The hieromnemon, selected annually by lot, was the official representative of the state in the Amphictyonic Council; the three pylagori were selected by vote as his advisors. The pylagori had the privilege of taking part in the debates of the Amphictyonic Council, but the vote of the state was cast by the hieromnemon.
55 See on Aeschin. 3.53.
56 The temple of Apollo at Delphi had been seriously injured by fire in 373 b.c. Repairs had been going on under an inter state commission. The work had been interrupted by the Phocian war, but was at this time nearing completion. The shields that the Athenians had caused to be re-hung were a part of the Athenian booty from the battle of Plataea. For almost a century and a half they had been an eyesore to the Thebans.
57 It would appear that the debate was over and the voting members, the hieromnemons,alone remained, when Aeschines rushed in and began to speak.
58 see on Aeschin. 1.64.
59 Before the next regular meeting of the Amphictyonic Council. The Council met twice a year, in spring and autumn. They always assembled at Thermopylae, and proceeded thence to Delphi.
60 Aeschines implies that Demosthenes drafted the motion in a form which gave it a very different effect from what was expected by the inexperienced senator through whom he had it presented to the senate.
61 Thebes, like Athens, held aloof from the special meeting of the Amphictyons. The final result of Thebes' adoption of Demosthenes' anti-Macedonian policy was her annihilation by Alexander five years before this speech was delivered.
62 Aeschines is thinking especially of the Thessalian commander of the expedition and his northern contingents, who had to come through the Pass of Thermopylae.
63 The Scholiast explains that certain celebrants were seized by a shark as they were taking the sacred bath in the sea at Eleusis.
64 After Philip's overwhelming victory at Chaeronea it was a surprise to every one that he did not immediately press on and invade Attica.
65 Athens and Thebes, in the old days god-fearing states of Hellas, have refused the service due the Delphic god, and have suffered every disaster; Philip, the barbarian, undertook the service of the god, and has received as his reward unheard-of power.
66 The Persian king was already dead when this speech was delivered, but the news had not yet reached Athens.
67 the seizure by the Phocians at the beginning of the Phocian war.
68 The Spartans had led an ill-advised revolt against the Macedonian overlordship, and had been completely defeated shortly before this speech was delivered. They were required to send fifty noble citizens as hostages to Alexander, who was now in Asia.
69 Hes. WD 240 ff.; cp. Aeschin. 2.158.
70 “It would be invidious to say that it was their pride and steady malice, when their malice had been renounced under duress, and their pride had had such a fatal fall” （Simcox）.
71 Nicea was an important strategic post at the eastern end of the Pass of Thermopylae.
72 Aeschines represents the Amphissian war as virtually a resumption of the Phocian war; both were wars in behalf of the Delphic shrine, but the relation of Thebes to the two was very different.
73 After passing through Thermopylae, Philip seized Elateia in northern Phocis and made it his base for the winter. It commanded the main road towards Thebes and Athens. For the Athenian feeling of the significance of its seizure, see the famous passage in the speech of Demosthenes, On the Crown, Dem. 19.168 ff.
74 The traditional policy of Athens had been to support the smaller Boeotian cities in their refusal to recognize Theban dominion over them.
75 In connection with their service as commanders of the army and navy the generals had a considerable share in the responsibility for foreign relations.
76 The charge is that Demosthenes was in a conspiracy to pad the rolls.
77 The administration, by detaching this large body of mercenaries and sending them to the immediate aid of the Amphissians, gave Philip the opportunity to sweep them away before meeting the army of the Athenians and Thebans at Chaeronea.
78 Demosthenes was elected to pronounce the eulogy at the public funeral of those who fell at Chaeronea.
79 Aeschines assumes that Demosthenes' opposition to Macedon was paid for by the king of Persia.
80 Demosthenes says （Dem. 19.248） that after the battle of Chaeronea the measures that were taken for the defence of the city were by his motions, and that he was also elected grain-commissioner. He may well have made a hurried voyage to the allies to raise money and supplies for the emergency.
81 Philip, contrary to Demosthenes' expectation, did not advance on Athens, and he offered moderate terms of peace.
82 Pausanias was the man who assassinated Philip.
83 Margites was the name of a caricature of Achilles in a poem that passed under the name of Homer. “Demosthenes asserted, then that Alexander, in his aspiration to be a second Achilles, would never get farther that to become a caricature of him.” （Richardson.）
84 Perhaps a sneer at Alexander's studies under Aristotle, the “Peripatetic.”
85 Philip's death was immediately followed by revolutionary movements centering in Thebes and Athens. The reference here is to Alexander's sudden descent upon Thebes, with the Thessalians as his supporters.
86 After the destruction of Thebes and the suppression of the revolt elsewhere, Alexander demanded the surrender of Demosthenes and other anti-Macedonian Athenian statesmen.
87 The citizen crew of the dispatch-ship Paralus.
88 The “Plataean status” was that of foreigners （slaves in some cases） who had received citizenship in return for services to the state. The status was named “Plataean” after those Plataean exiles who were made Athenian citizens after the destruction of Plataea in the fifth year of the Peloponnesian war.
89 The coast of Cilicia; the time referred to is that preceding the battle of Issus.
90 The Greeks gilded the horns of cattle that were about to be sacrificed, and put garlands on their heads.
91 Corrhagus was the Macedonian commander. The reference is to the Spartan revolt against Macedonia, which had been put down by Antipater shortly before the case of Aeschines against Ctesiphon came to trial.
92 Nymphaeum was a port of the Tauric Chersonese.
93 The Cimmerian Bosporus; the chief city was Panticapeum, the modern Kertch.
94 In 451/0 Pericles carried a measure which excluded from citizenship all who could not show pure Athenian blood through both parents. By the close of the Peloponnesian war this restriction had fallen into neglect, and in 403 the restored democracy passed an enactment excluding from citizenship children born of a foreign mother after that date. If Demosthenes' mother was born of a Thracian mother and after 403 （neither fact is certain）, she could not bear legitimate children to her Athenian husband.
95 For To be a trierarch implied that a man was in comfortable circumstances. “He sank as a trierarch to rise as a pettifogger.” （Simcox.）
96 The “Painted Colonnade,” probably on the eastern side of the Agora, was decorated with frescoes by some of the greatest painters, depicting famous battle, and victories in the history of the city.
97 The Scholiast puts Philammon's victory in 360 B.C.
98 We are not reliably informed what notorious incapacity or scandalous conduct made Pataecion's name appropriate for this comparison. The audience evidently needed no explanation.
99 “The form of the paragraph is lively and ungrammatical.” （Simcox.）
100 “Punish him” was no sooner said than done.
101 The meaning is that these influential men come into court and use their influence to secure the acquittal of personal friends of theirs.
102 Into the clepsydra, by which the time allowed to each side was measured. Cp. Aeschin. 2.126 and note.
103 The jurors balloted first on the question whether the motion was illegal as charged. If they sustained the prosecution, both sides then argued the question of the nature and extent of the penalty, after which the jurors cast a final ballot, fixing the penalty.
104 The reference is still to the request of influential men who come into court to help their friends.
105 The tablet is the bulletin-board which had been publicly posted in advance to the trial, containing the indictment, the motion which was attacked, and the laws which were alleged to be violated by the motion.
106 Aeschines assumes that Ctesiphon's speech has been composed for him by Demosthenes, and that it will be a mere introduction to the real defence, which will follow from the lips of Demosthenes himself, speaking nominally as friendly supporter （συνήγορος） of Ctesiphon.
107 In court, plaintiff and defendant had each a platform, where he sat with his intimate friends and supporters. It would appear from this passage that listeners who sympathized with either party grouped themselves near his platform.
108 ἀγῶνες ἀτίμητοι were those in which the penalty was fixed by statute; in ἀγῶνες τιμητοίthe penalty was to be determined in each case by the jury. Aeschines represents the latter class of cases as involving less peril to the defendant.
109 The Greek word ὑπεύθυνον, here rendered “accountable,” is the technical expression for the accountability of the official who has not yet appeared before the board of auditors.
110 See Aeschin. 2.93. The single case there referred to is, so far as we know, the only pretext for Aeschines' “thousand gashes.”
111 See on Aeschin. 3.52.
112 No such charge as to Aeschines' relations with the young men is found in Demosthenes' published speech.
113 No such point is made at the beginning of Demosthenes' published speech, nor explicitly in any other part of it.
114 See Aeschin. 3.77.
115 See Aeschin. 3.107 ff.
116 See Aeschin. 3.85 ff.
117 The wealthy leaders of the property-groups on which the burden of the trierarchy was laid.
118 In 340 B.C. Demosthenes carried a reform of the naval system, by which he compelled the richest citizens to contribute to the support of the navy strictly in proportion to their wealth. Under his system the number of individuals contributing （the trierarchs） may well have been diminished, but the number of the triremes was not lessened, their efficiency was increased, and taxation was made equitable. The matter is fully discussed in Dem. 19.102-109.
119 In the battle of Naxos, 376 B.C., Chabrias with an Athenian fleet of 83 triremes defeated Pollis, who with a Lacedaemonian fleet of 65 ships was trying to cut off the Athenian grain ships.
120 Demosthenes asserts （Dem. 19.137） that Anaxinus had come as a spy of the Macedonians, and that Aeschines was caught in a secret interview with him. The purchases for Olympias, Philip's wife, may well have been a pretext for his visit to Athens.
121 No such passage occurs in the published speech of Demosthenes. It is likely that he omitted it when he revised his speech for publication.
122 Crowns were frequently sent from one state to another in recognition of generous services.
123 We learn from the orator Lycurgus （Lyc. Against Leocrates 44） that in the past to fortify the city immediately after Chaeronea the very tombs were made to yield stones, as they had done in the hurried fortifying by Themistocles after the Persian wars （Thuc. 1.93.1）. Aeschines wrongly implies that these hurried emergency measures were a part of the work that was done later in a thorough manner under Demosthenes' direction.
124 See on Aeschin. 3.132.
125 It appears that when Athens refused the 300 talents which had been brought from the king of Persia to help in organizing a revolt against Alexander, the Persian envoys put at least a part of the gold into Demosthenes' hands, in the expectation that he would use it in unofficial efforts against Macedon.
126 After Thebes revolted from Alexander, her citadel was still held by a garrison of his mercenaries.
127 This accusation is elaborated in Deinarchus' speech against Demosthenes （Dein. 1.18-21）. He says that the Arcadians came up as far as the Isthmus, and that their general offered their services for ten talents, but that Demosthenes refused to furnish the money to the Thebans, who were conducting the negotiations, and so the Arcadian general sold out to the Macedonians and led his troops home.
128 The rich Athenian took his turn in serving the city as choregus, contributing to meet the expenses of some state festival. Demosthenes, too, is a rich man of the choregus class, but all his contributions are to serve his own lusts.
129 Although each party to a suit was required to plead his own cause, he might call on friends to supplement his plea. In some cases this supporting plea was in reality the main plea in the case, as it certainly was on this occasion. See on Aeschin. 3.201.
130 This Alexander, brother of Philip's wife Olympias, married Philip's daughter Cleopatra. He was killed in Italy in 330 B.C.. in an expedition to aid the Tarentines.
131 This strange custom perpetuated the old feeling of the ceremonial impurity that rested on any man or thing that had shed human blood.
132 “Just as the law orders that a vendor should give a purchaser of property a security for the validity of his purchase, so should the orator he compelled to show that his conduct, for which the reward is claimed, is a sure and proper ground on which to grant it.” （Gwatkin and Shuckburgh, ad loc.）
133 This was Leocrates, who had ventured to return to Athens after eight years' absence. Lycurgus' speech for the prosecution has come down to us.
134 See Aeschin. 3.159 and note.
135 The recent revolt of Sparta against Macedonia and the present brilliant success of Alexander in Asia made the situation especially critical for Greece so far as any thought of opposition to Macedon was still cherished. It might well be expected that at the coming meeting of the Amphictyonic Council, or at a special synod of delegates from the Greek states held at the time of the Pythian games, complaint would be brought by the Macedonians against the Spartans and those who had encouraged them in breaking the peace.
136 Arthmius was sent by Xerxes into the Peloponnesus.