On the False Embassy

Well, when he tries to insult other people by calling them speech-makers and charlatans, he shall be shown to be open to the same reproach. For those iambics come from the Phoenix of Euripides. That play was never acted by Theodorus or Aristodemus, for whom Aeschines commonly took the inferior parts; Molon however produced it, and perhaps some other players of the old school. But Sophocles’ Antigone was frequently acted by Theodorus, and also by Aristodemus; and in that play there are some iambic lines, admirably and most instructively composed. That passage Aeschines omitted to quote, though he has often spoken the lines, and knows them by heart;

for of course you are aware that, in all tragic dramas, it is the enviable privilege of third-rate actors to come on as tyrants, carrying their royal scepters. Now you shall weigh the merits of the verses which were specially written by the poet for the character of Creon-Aeschines, though he forgot to repeat them to himself in connection with his embassy, and did not quote them to the jury. Read.

Iambics from the Antigone of Sophocles
1. Who shall appraise the spirit of a man,
2. His mind, his temper, till he hath been proved
3. In ministry of laws and government?
4. I hold, and long have held, that man a knave
5. Who, standing at the helm of state, deserts
6. The wisest counsel, or in craven fear
7. Of any, sets a curb upon his lips.
8. Who puts his friend above his fatherland
9. I scorn as nothing worth; and for myself,
10. Witness all-seeing Heaven! I will not hold
11. My peace when I descry the curse that comes
12. To sap my citizens’ security;
13. Nor will I count as kin my country’s foes;
14. For well I wot our country is the ship
15. That saves us all, sailing on even keel:
16. Embarked in her we fear no dearth of friends.

Aeschines did not quote any of these lines for his own instruction on his embassy. He put the hospitality and friendship of Philip far above his country,—and found it more profitable. He bade a long farewell to the sage Sophocles; and when he saw the curse that came,—to wit, the army advancing upon the Phocians,—he sounded no warning, sent no timely report; rather he helped both to conceal and to execute the design, and obstructed those who were ready to tell the truth.

He forgot the ship that saves; forgot that embarked in her his own mother, performing her rites, scouring her candidates, making her pittance from the substance of her employers, here reared her hopeful brood to greatness. Here, too, his father, who kept an infant-school, lived as best he could,—next door to Heros the physician,[*](Heros the Physician: or the Hero Physician; see Dem. 18.129, and note.) as I am told by elderly informants,—anyhow, he lived in this city. The offspring of this pair earned a little money as junior clerks and messengers in the public offices, until, by your favor, they became full-fledged clerks, with free maintenance for two years in the Rotunda.[*](The Prytaneum or Town Hall.) Finally, from this same city Aeschines received his commission as ambassador.

He cared for none of these obligations; he took no thought that the ship of state should sail on even keel; he scuttled her and sank her, and so far as in him lay put her at the mercy of her foes. Are not you then a charlatan? Yes, and a vile one too. Are not you a speech-writer? Yes, and an unprincipled one to boot. You passed over the speech that you so often spoke on the stage, and knew by heart; you hunted up rant that in all your career you had never declaimed in character, and revived it for the undoing of your own fellow-citizen.

Let us now turn to his remarks about Solon. By way of censure and reproach of the impetuous style of Timarchus, he alleged that a statue of Solon, with his robe drawn round him and his hand enfolded, had been set up to exemplify the self-restraint of the popular orators of that generation. People who live at Salamis, however, inform us that this statue was erected less than fifty years ago. Now from the age of Solon to the present day about two hundred and forty years have elapsed, so that the sculptor who designed that disposition of drapery had not lived in Solon’s time,—nor even his grand-father.

He illustrated his remarks by representing to the jury the attitude of the statue; but his mimicry did not include what, politically, would have been much more profitable than an attitude,—a view of Solon’s spirit and purpose, so widely different from his own. When Salamis had revolted, and the Athenian people had forbidden under penalty of death any proposal for its recovery, Solon, accepting the risk of death, composed and recited an elegiac poem, and so retrieved that country for Athens and removed a standing dishonor.

Aeschines, on the other hand, gave away and sold Amphipolis, a city which the King of Persia and all Greece recognized as yours, speaking in support of the resolution moved by Philocrates. It was highly becoming in him, was it not to remind us of Solon? Not content with this performance at home, he went to Macedonia, and never mentioned the place with which his mission was concerned. So he stated in his own report, for no doubt you remember how he said I, too, had something to say about Amphipolis, but I left it out to give Demosthenes a chance of dealing with that subject.

I rose and told you that he had never once left to me anything that he wanted to say to Philip: he would sooner give a man a share of his life-blood than a share of his speech. The truth is that, having accepted money, he could hardly confront Philip, who gave him the money on purpose that he might not restore Amphipolis. Now, please, take and read these elegiac verses of Solon, to show the jury how Solon detested people like the defendant.

What we require, Aeschines, is not oratory with enfolded hands, but diplomacy with enfolded hands. But in Macedonia you held out your hands, turned them palm upwards, and brought shame upon your countrymen, and then here at home you talk magniloquently; you practise and declaim some miserable fustian, and think to escape the due penalty of your heinous crimes, if you only don your little skull-cap,[*](skull-cap: a soft cap commonly worn by invalids; also, according to Plutarch, by Solon, when he recited his verses on Salamis. Demosthenes ironically pretends that the defendant is still suffering from his sham illness [Dem. 19.124].) take your constitutional, and abuse me. Now read.

Solon’s Elegiacs
1. Not by the doom of Zeus, who ruleth all,
2. Not by the curse of Heaven shall Athens fall.
3. Strong in her Sire, above the favored land
4. Pallas Athene lifts her guardian hand.
5. No; her own citizens with counsels vain
6. Shall work her rain in their quest of gain;
7. Dishonest demagogues her folk misguide,
8. Foredoomed to suffer for their guilty pride.
9. Their reckless greed, insatiate of delight,
10. Knows not to taste the frugal feast aright;
11. Th’ unbridled lust of gold, their only care,
12. Nor public wealth nor wealth divine will spare.
13. Now here, now there, they raven, rob and seize,
14. Heedless of Justice and her stern decrees,
15. Who silently the present and the past
16. Reviews, whose slow revenge o’ertakes at last.
17. On every home the swift contagion falls,
18. Till servitude a free-born race enthralls.
19. Now faction reigns now wakes the sword of strife,
20. And comely youth shall pay its toll of life;
21. We waste our strength in conflict with our kin,
22. And soon our gates shall let the foeman in.
23. Such woes the factious nation shall endure;
24. A fate more hard awaits the hapless poor;
25. For them, enslaved, bound with insulting chains,
26. Captivity in alien lands remains.
27. To every hearth the public curse extends;
28. The courtyard gate no longer safety lends;
29. Death leaps the wall, nor shall he shun the doom
30. Who flies for safety to his inmost room.
31. Ye men of Athens, listen while I show
32. How many ills from lawless licence flow.
33. Respect for Law shall check your rising lust,
34. Humble the haughty, fetter the unjust,
35. Make the rough places plain, bid envy cease,
36. Wither infatuation’s fell increase,
37. Make crooked judgement straight, the works prevent
38. Of insolence and sullen discontent,
39. And quench the fires of strife. In Law we find
40. The wisdom and perfection of Mankind.

You have heard, men of Athens, what Solon says of men of such character, and of the gods who protect our city. That saying about the protection of our city by the gods is, as I hope and firmly believe, eternally true; and in a manner I think that even the events of this scrutiny furnish the commonwealth with a new example of the divine favor.

For consider this: a man who had scandalously misconducted his embassy, and who had given away whole provinces in which the gods should have been worshipped by you and your allies, disfranchised one who had prosecuted him at duty’s call.[*](Demosthenes asserts that Timarchus prosecuted Aeschines from purely patriotic motives. The Greek, however, admits of more than one interpretation.) And all for what? That he himself may win neither compassion nor indulgence for his own transgressions. Moreover, in accusing him, he went out of his way to speak evil of me, and again at the Assembly he declared he would lay an indictment, with other such threats. And why? In order that you may extend your best indulgence to me when I, who have the most accurate knowledge of his villainies, and have watched him closely throughout, appear as his prosecutor.

Again, thanks to his continual evasions, he has at last been brought to trial at the very moment when, for the sake of the future if for no other reason, you cannot possibly, or consistently with your own security, allow a man so steeped in corruption to go scot-free; for, while it is always your duty, men of Athens, to abhor and to chastise traitors and bribe-mongers, a conviction at this crisis will be peculiarly seasonable and profitable to all mankind.

A strange and distressing epidemic, men of Athens, has invaded all Greece, calling for extraordinary good fortune, and for the most anxious treatment on your part. The magnates of the several cities, who are entrusted with political authority, are betraying their own independence, unhappy men! They are imposing on themselves a servitude of their own choosing, disguising it by specious names, as the friendship of Philip, fraternity, good-fellowship, and such flummery. The rest of the people, and all the various authorities of the several states, instead of chastising these persons and putting them to death on the spot, as they ought, are filled with admiration and envy, and would all like to be Philip’s friends too.

Yet this infatuation, this hankering after Philip, men of Athens, until very recently had only destroyed the predominance of the Thessalians and their national prestige, but now it is already sapping their independence, for some of their citadels are actually garrisoned by Macedonians. It has invaded Peloponnesus and caused the massacres at Elis. It infected those unhappy people with such delirious insanity that, to overmaster one another and to gratify Philip, they stained their hands with the blood of their own kindred and fellow-citizens.

It has not stopped there. It has entered Arcadia, and turned Arcadian politics upside down; and now many of that nation, who ought to pride themselves as highly as you upon their independence—for you and they are the only indigenous peoples in Greece—admire Philip, set up his effigy in bronze, decorate it with garlands, and, to crown all, have enacted a decree that, if he ever visits Peloponnesus, he shall be made welcome within their walls. The Argives have followed their example.

Holy Mother Earth! if I am to speak as a sane man, we stand in need of the utmost vigilance, when this infection, moving in its circuit, has invaded our own city. Therefore take your precautions now, while we are still secure. Let the men who have brought it here be punished with infamy. If not, beware lest you discern the wisdom of my words too late, when you have lost the power of doing what you ought.

Do you not see, men of Athens, what a conspicuous and striking example is offered by those miserable Olynthians, who owe their rain, unhappy men, to nothing so much as to such conduct as I have described? You may easily discover the truth by a review of their experience. At the time when their cavalry was only four hundred strong, and their whole force numbered no more than five thousand, for there was then no coalition of all the Chalcidians,

they were invaded by the Lacedaemonians with a large force, both naval and military; and you will remember that in those days the Lacedaemonians may be said to have held command both of land and of sea. Yet in spite of the strength of the attacking force, they never lost a town or even an outpost, they won many engagements, they slew three of the enemy commanders, and finally brought the war to an end on their own terms.[*](Some Chalcidian cities obtained aid against the growing power of Olynthus, and the war lasted from 382 to 379, when the Olynthians sued for peace and became members of the Spartan Confederacy, not exactly on their own terms.)

But when some of them began to accept bribes, when the populace was so stupid, or, let us say, so unlucky, as to give more credence to those persons than to patriotic speakers, when Lasthenes had roofed his house with timber sent as a present from Macedonia, and Euthycrates was keeping a large herd of cattle for which he had paid nothing to anybody, when one man returned home with a flock of sheep and another with a stud of horses, when the masses, whose interests were endangered, instead of being angry and demanding the punishment of the traitors, stared at them, envied them, honored them, and thought them fine fellows,—