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For they knew perfectly well that in other conditions they could not get the upper hand, but that if you were in distress they would succeed. And they supposed that in your eagerness to be relieved of your actual hardships you would give no thought to those that were to follow.
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Now, to show that he was one of the overseers, I will offer you witnesses; not the men who then acted with him,—for I could not do that,—but those who heard it from Eratosthenes himself:
47
yet truly, if they were sensible,i.e., the accomplices of Eratosthenes. they would be bearing witness against those persons, and would severely punish their instructors in transgression; instead of holding themselves bound by their oaths to the detriment of the citizens, if they were sensible they would make light of breaking those oaths for the advantage of the city. So much then, I would say in regard to them: now call my witnesses. Go up on the dais.
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Witnesses
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You have heard the witnesses. Finally, when he was established in power, he had a hand in no good work, but in much that was otherwise. Yet, if he was really a good man, it behoved him in the first place to decline unconstitutional powers, or else to lay information before the Council exposing the falsity of all the impeachments, and showing that Batrachus and Aeschylides, so far from giving true information, were producing as impeachments the fabrications of the Thirty, devised for the injury of the citizens.
