On the Crown

You hear, Aeschines, how the statute expressly makes an exception: persons named in any decree of the Council or the Assembly always excepted. They are to be proclaimed. Then why this miserable pettifogging? Why these insincere arguments? Why do you not try hellebore for your complaint? Are you not ashamed to prosecute for spite, not for crime; misquoting this statute, curtailing that statute, when they ought to be read in their entirety to a jury sworn to vote according to their direction?

And, while behaving like that, you treat us to your definition of all the qualities proper to a patriotic politician—as though you had bespoken a statue according to specification, and it had been delivered without the qualities specified ! As though talk, not deeds and policy, were the criterion of patriotism ! And then you raise your voice, like a clown at a carnival,[*](like a clown at a carnival: lit., as from a wagon, in the procession at a Dionysiac festival, when coarse raillery was customary. A similar expression is used in Dem. 18.11 and Dem. 18.124.) and pelt me with epithets both decent and obscene, suitable for yourself and your kindred, but not for me.

Here is another point, men of Athens. The difference between railing and accusation I take to be this: accusation implies crimes punishable by law; railing, such abuse as quarrelsome people vent upon one another according to their disposition. These law courts, if I am not mistaken, were built by our ancestors, not that we should convene you here to listen to us taunting one another with the secret scandal of private life, but that we should here bring home to the guilty offences against the public weal.

Aeschines knows that as well as I do; but he has a keener taste for scurrility than for accusation. However, even in that respect he deserves to get as good as he gives. I will come to that presently; meantime I will ask him just one question. Are we to call you the enemy of Athens, Aeschines, or my enemy? Mine, of course. Yet you let slip your proper opportunities of bringing me to justice on behalf of the citizens, if I had done wrong, by audit, by indictment, by any sort of legal procedure;

but here, where I am invulnerable on every ground, by law, by lapse of time, by limitation, by many earlier judgements covering every point, by default of any previous conviction for any public offence, here, where the country must take her share in the repute or disrepute of measures that were approved by the people, here you have met me face to face. You pose as my enemy; are you sure you are not the enemy of the people?

A righteous and conscientious verdict is now sufficiently indicated; but I have still, as it seems—not because I have any taste for railing, but because of his calumnies—to state the bare necessary facts about Aeschines, in return for a great many lies. I must let you know who this man, who starts on vituperation so glibly—who ridicules certain words of mine though he has himself said things that every decent man would shrink from uttering—really is, and what is his parentage.

Why, if my calumniator had been Aeacus, or Rhadamanthus, or Minos, instead of a mere scandalmonger, a market-place loafer, a poor devil of a clerk, he could hardly have used such language, or equipped himself with such offensive expressions. Hark to his melodramatic bombast: Oh, Earth! Oh, Sun! Oh, Virtue, and all that vaporing; his appeals to intelligence and education, whereby we discriminate between things of good and evil report—for that was the sort of rubbish you heard him spouting.

Virtue! you runagate; what have you or your family to do with virtue? How do you distinguish between good and evil report? Where and how did you qualify as a moralist? Where did you get your right to talk about education? No really educated man would use such language about himself, but would rather blush to hear it from others; but people like you, who make stupid pretensions to the culture of which they are utterly destitute, succeed in disgusting everybody whenever they open their lips, but never in making the impression they desire.

I am at no loss for information about you and your family; but I am at a loss where to begin. Shall I relate how your father Tromes was a slave in the house of Elpias, who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck? or how your mother practised daylight nuptials in an outhouse next door to Heros the bone-setter,[*](Heros the bone-setter: this interpretation is doubtful; it assumes (1) identity with a person called, more respectfully, Heros the physician, in a similar passage of the speech On the Embassy, Dem. 19; (2) that καλαμίτης may mean one who uses splints (κάλαμοι). Otherwise: near the shrine (or statue) of the hero Calamites—unknown elsewhere, but perhaps identical with the Lycian Hero Physician. See Essay 6. in Goodwin’s edition.) and so brought you up to act in tableaux vivants and to excel in minor parts on the stage? However, everybody knows that without being told by me. Shall I tell you how Phormio the boatswain, a slave of Dio of Phrearrii, uplifted her from that chaste profession? But I protest that, however well the story becomes you, I am afraid I may be thought to have chosen topics unbecoming to myself.

I will pass by those early days, and begin with his conduct of his own life; for indeed it has been no ordinary life, but such as is an abomination to a free people. Only recently— recently, do I say? Why it was only the day before yesterday when he became simultaneously an Athenian and an orator, and, by the addition of two syllables, transformed his father from Tromes to Atrometus, and bestowed upon his mother the high sounding name of Glaucothea, although she was universally known as the Banshee, a nickname she owed to the pleasing diversity of her acts and experiences—it can have no other origin.

You were raised from servitude to freedom, and from beggary to opulence, by the favor of your fellow-citizens, and yet you are so thankless and ill-conditioned that, instead of showing them your gratitude, you take the pay of their enemies and conduct political intrigues to their detriment. I will not deal with speeches which, on a disputable construction, may be called patriotic, but I will recall to memory acts by which he was proved beyond doubt to have served your enemies.

You all remember Antiphon, the man who was struck off the register, and came back to Athens after promising Philip that he would set fire to the dockyard. When I had caught him in hiding at Peiraeus, and brought him before the Assembly, this malignant fellow raised a huge outcry about my scandalous and undemocratic conduct in assaulting citizens in distress and breaking into houses without a warrant, and so procured his acquittal.

Had not the Council of the Areopagus, becoming aware of the facts, and seeing that you had made a most inopportune blunder, started further inquiries, arrested the man, and brought him into court a second time, the vile traitor would have slipped out of your hands and eluded justice, being smuggled out of the city by our bombastic phrase-monger. As it was, you put him on the rack and then executed him, and you ought to have done the same to Aeschines.

In fact, the Council of the Areopagus knew well that Aeschines had been to blame throughout this affair, and therefore when, after choosing him by vote to speak in support of your claims to the Temple at Delos, by a misapprehension such as has often been fatal to your public interests, you invited the cooperation of that Council and gave them full authority, they promptly rejected him as a traitor, and gave the brief to Hypereides. On this occasion the ballot was taken at the altar, and not a single vote was cast for this wretch.

To prove the truth of my statement, please call the witnesses.

(The Depositions are read)

We, Callias of Sunium, Zeno of Phlya, Cleon of Phalerum, Demonicus of Marathon, on behalf of all the councillors, bear witness for Demosthenes that, when the people elected Aeschines state-advocate before the Amphictyons in the matter of the temple at Delos, we in Council judged Hypereides more worthy to speak on behalf of the state, and Hypereides was accordingly commissioned.

Thus by rejecting this man from his spokesmanship, and giving the appointment to another, the Council branded him as a traitor and an enemy to the people.

So much for one of his spirited performances. Is it not just like the charges he brings against me? Now let me remind you of another. Philip had sent to us Pytho of Byzantium in company with an embassy representing all his allies, hoping to bring dishonor upon Athens and convict her of injustice. Pytho was mightily confident, denouncing you with a full spate of eloquence, but I did not shrink from the encounter. I stood up and contradicted him, refusing to surrender the just claims of the commonwealth, and proving that Philip was in the wrong so conclusively that his own allies rose and admitted I was right; but Aeschines took Philip’s side throughout, and bore witness, even false witness, against his own country.

Nor did that satisfy him. At a later date he was caught again in the company of the spy Anaxinus at the house of Thraso. Yet a man who secretly met and conversed with a spy sent by the enemy must have been himself a spy by disposition and an enemy of his country. To prove the truth of my statement, please call the witnesses.

(The Depositions are read)

Teledemus, son of Cleon, Hypereides, son of Callaeschrus, Nicomachus, son of Diophantus, bear witness for Demosthenes, and have taken oath before the Generals that to their knowledge Aeschines, son of Atrometus, of Cothocidae, comes by night to the house of Thraso and holds communication with Anaxinus, who has been proved to be a spy from Philip. These depositions were lodged with Nicias on the third day of Hecatombaeon.

I omit thousands of stories that I could tell you about him. The fact is, I could cite many clear instances of his conduct at that time, helping the enemy and maligning me; only it is not your way to score up such offences for accurate remembrance and due resentment. You have a vicious habit of allowing too much indulgence to anyone who chooses by spiteful calumnies to trip up the heels of a man who gives you good advice. You give away a sound policy in exchange for the entertainment you derive from invective; and so it is easier and safer for a public man to serve your enemies and pocket their pay than to choose and maintain a patriotic attitude.

Though it was a scandalous shame enough, God knows, openly to take Philip’s side against his own country even before the war, make him a present, if you choose, make him a present of that. But when our merchantmen had been openly plundered, when the Chersonese was being ravaged, when the man was advancing upon Attica, when there could no longer be any doubt about the position, but war had already begun—even after that this malignant mumbler of blank verse can point to no patriotic act. No profitable proposition, great or small, stands to the credit of Aeschines. If he claims any, let him cite it now, while my hour-glass[*](hour-glass, the clepsydra or water-clock, used to measure the time allowed by the court to each speaker.) runs. But there is none. Now one of two things: either he made no alternative proposal because he could find no fault with my policy, or he did not disclose his amendments because his object was the advantage of the enemy.

Did he then refrain from speech as well as from moving resolutions, when there was any mischief to be done? Why, no one else could get in a word! Apparently the city could stand, and he could do without detection, almost anything; but there was one performance of his that really gave the finishing touch to his earlier efforts. On that he has lavished all his wealth of words, citing in full the decrees against the Amphissians of Locri, in the hope of distorting the truth. But he can never disguise it. No, Aeschines, you will never wash out that stain; you cannot talk long enough for that!