70
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,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. 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—
71
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.
