On the False Embassy

Although so many, indeed all, of his acts on embassy were so discreditable and unpatriotic, he goes about asking: And what are we to say of Demosthenes, who denounces his own colleagues? Yes, indeed; I do and must denounce them, willingly or unwillingly, having been the victim of your machinations throughout the expedition, and being now reduced to the alternative of appearing as either the accomplice or the accuser of your crimes.

I declare I was no colleague of yours; yours was an embassy of flagrant wrong, mine was an embassy of loyal service. Your colleague was Philocrates, and you and Phryno were his; for it was you and your friends who did these things and who approved of them. Hark to his melodramatic whine: Where is the salt of friendship? where is the genial board? where is the cup of communion? as if doers of justice, not doers of iniquity, were traitors to those symbols!

I know that the Presidents[*](The fifty Prytanes, belonging to one tribe, and performing for one tenth of the year the functions of the Council of Five Hundred.) unite in a sacrificial service, dine together, and make libation together; but it does not follow that the honest men take their cue from the knaves; as soon as they detect one of themselves in misconduct, they lay information before the Council and the Assembly. In just the same way the Council holds its service of inauguration and its social banquet; the commanders unite in worship and libation; and so of all, or nearly all, the public authorities. Do they give impunity to delinquent colleagues on account of these observances? No, indeed!

Leon denounced Timagoras, his fellow-ambassador for four years; Eubulus his messmates, Tharrex and Smicythus; and long ago Conon denounced Adeimantus after serving with him as general. Who were untrue to their salt and to the cup of friendship, Aeschines? The traitors, the false ambassadors, and the bribe-takers, or their accusers? The evil-doers, like you, broke covenant not with their friends alone but with the whole nation.

To show you, then, that these men are the basest and most depraved of all Philip’s visitors, private as well as official,—yes, of all of them,—let me tell you a trifling story that has nothing to do with the embassy. After Philip had taken Olynthus, he was holding Olympian games,[*](Not the great Olympian Games of Elis, but a Macedonian festival held at Dium. The date is probably the spring of 347 B.C.) and had invited all sorts of artists to the religious celebration and the festival.

At the entertainment at which he crowned the successful competitors, he asked Satyrus, the comedian of our city, why he was the only guest who had not asked any favor; had he observed in him any illiberality or discourtesy towards himself? Satyrus, as the story goes, replied that he did not want any such gift as the others were asking; what he would like to ask was a favor which Philip could grant quite easily, and yet he feared that his request would be unsuccessful.

Philip bade him speak out, declaring with the easy generosity of youth that there was nothing he would not do for him. Thereupon Satyrus told him that Apollophanes of Pydna had been a friend of his, and that after his death by assassination his kinsmen in alarm had secretly removed his daughters, who were then children, to Olynthus. These girls had been made captive when the town was taken, and were now in Philip’s hands, and of marriageable age.

I earnestly beg you, he went on, to bestow them on me. At the same time I wish you to understand what sort of gift you will be giving me, if you do give it. It will bring me no gain, for I shall provide them with dowries and give them in marriage; and I shall not permit them to suffer any treatment unworthy of myself or of their father. It is said that, when the other guests heard this speech, there was such an outburst of applause and approval that Philip was strongly moved, and granted the boon. And yet Apollophanes was one of the men who had slain Philip’s own brother Alexander.

Now let us compare the banquet of Satyrus with another entertainment which these men attended in Macedonia; and you shall see whether there is any sort of resemblance. These men had been invited to the house of Xenophron, a son of Phaedimus, who was one of the Thirty Tyrants, and off they went; but I declined to go. When the drinking began, Xenophron introduced an Olynthian woman,—a handsome, but a freeborn and, as the event proved, a modest girl.

At first, I believe, they only tried to make her drink quietly and eat dessert; so Iatrocles told me the following day. But as the carouse went on, and they became heated, they ordered her to sit down and give them a song. The poor girl was bewildered, for she did not wish, and she did not know how, to sing. Then Aeschines and Phryno declared that it was intolerable impertinence for a captive,—and one of those ungodly, pernicious Olynthians too,—to give herself such airs. Call a servant, they cried; bring a whip, somebody. In came a flunkey with a horsewhip, and—I suppose they were tipsy, and it did not take much to irritate them,when she said something and began to cry, he tore off her dress and gave her a number of lashes on the back.

Maddened by these indignities, she jumped to her feet, upset the table, and fell at the knees of Iatrocles. If he had not rescued her, she would have perished, the victim of a drunken orgy, for the drunkenness of this blackguard is something terrible. The story of this girl was told even in Arcadia, at a meeting of the Ten Thousand[*](The Assembly of the Arcadian Confederacy, meeting at Megalopolis.); it was related by Diophantus at Athens in a report which I will compel him to repeat in evidence; and it was common talk in Thessaly and everywhere.

With all this on his conscience the unclean scoundrel will dare to look you in the face, and before long he will be declaiming in sonorous accents about his blameless life. It makes me choke with rage. As if the jury did not know all about you: first the acolyte,[*](the acolyte, etc.: see Dem. 18.259 ff.) reading the service-books while your mother performed her hocus-pocus, reeling and tumbling, child as you were, with bacchanals and tipsy worshippers;

then the junior clerk, doing the dirty work of public offices for a few shillings a month: and at last, not so long ago, the parasite of the greenrooms, eking out by sponging what you earned as a player of trumpery parts! What is the life you will claim, and where have you lived it, when such is too clearly the sort of life you really have lived? And then the assurance of the man! Bringing another man[*](Timarchus; see Introd. p. 234.) before this court on a charge of unnatural crime! However, I will let that go for the present. First read these depositions.

(The Depositions are read)

Of all these heinous crimes against the commonwealth, gentlemen of the jury, he has been proved guilty. No element of baseness is lacking. Bribe-taker, sycophant, guilty under the curse, a liar, a traitor to his friends,—here are flagrant charges indeed! Yet he will not defend himself against any one of them; he has no honest and straightforward defence to offer. As for the topics on which, as I am informed, he intends to dwell, they border on insanity,—though, perhaps, a man devoid of any honest plea cannot help resorting to all manner of shifts.