DEMOSTHENES
Empusa[1]: having got that title (it is plain) from her doing and submitting to anything—how else could she have got it? However, you are so ungrateful and wicked by nature, that after being raised through the people from servitude to freedom, from beggary to affluence, instead of returning their kindness, you work against them as a hireling politician.
That he should cooperate openly with Philip before the war, was shocking—O heaven and earth! could it be otherwise?—against his country! Yet allow him if you please, allow him this. But when the ships had openly been made prize, Chersonesus was ravaged, the man was marching against Attica, matters were no longer doubtful, war had begun—nothing that he ever did for you can this malicious iambic-mouther show—not a resolution has Æschines, great or small, concerning the interests of the state. If he asserts it. let him prove it now while my waterglass[2] is running. But there is none. He is reduced to an alternative:—either he had no fault to find with my measures, and therefore moved none against them; or he sought the good of the enemy, and therefore would not propose any better.
- ↑ This denotes a frightful specter or hobgoblin. According to Aristophanes (Frogs, 283) it could change itself into various shapes.—Kennedy.
- ↑ The Athenians, to prevent the parties from saying more than was necessary, timed them by a glass in which water trickled through a narrow tube like sand in one of our minute glasses.—Kennedy.
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