155
This was the proclamation then, but not today. For when the herald has led forward the man who is responsible for making the children orphans, what will he proclaim? What words will he utter? For if he shall recite the mere dictates of the decree, yet the truth, ashamed, will refuse to be silent, and we shall seem to hear it crying out in words which contradict the voice of the herald, This man, if man he can be called, the Athenian people crown, the basest— ‘for his virtue’ and ‘for his nobility‘—the coward and deserter.
156
No! by Zeus and the gods, do not, my fellow citizens, do not, I beseech you, set up in the orchestra of Dionysus a memorial of your own defeat; do not in the presence of the Greeks convict the Athenian people of having lost their reason; do not remind the poor Thebans of their incurable and irreparable disasters, men who, exiled through Demosthenes’ acts, found refuge with you, when their shrines and children and tombs had been destroyed by Demosthenes’ taking of bribes and by the Persian gold.Aeschines assumes that Demosthenes’ opposition to Macedon was paid for by the king of Persia.