come down to us, were written for delivery by the plaintiff or the defendant in person. Part of the orator's art consisted in adapting them to the style and manner of man his client happened to be. This circumstance often gives piquancy to these speeches. They abound in amusing passages illustrative of many varieties of Athenian life. We have descriptive touches of the peculiar ways of the commercial rogue, of the money-lender, of the fraudulent trustee. Fortune has been kind in preserving for us something like thirty orations of Demosthenes, in which these and kindred figures present themselves to our notice. We thus peep into the banking-house and the factory, and see the Athenian citizen bargaining with merchants and shipowners, or busy with his farm, or making his last will and testament.
Athens was a city in which lawsuits could not fail to be plentiful. It was a centre of trade, and a resort of foreigners from all parts. Then, too, there were the mines of Laurium along the coast; there were quarries of marble; and the adjacent seas were famous for their fisheries. Athenian manufactures, too, were highly prized. From the shores of the Black Sea and the islands of the Ægean there was a good trade in corn, timber, wine, and wool. Here were all the materials of commerce, and consequently of litigation. Many an Athenian citizen was himself in business; and the city seems to have swarmed with bustling, enterprising foreigners who found it convenient to make it their home. The law courts had plenty of work to do—so much so, indeed, that the "law's delay" appears to have
