Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/417

On the Birth-Year of Demosthenes. 407 ision which would be scarcely consistent with common sense, and which can never safely be presumed even in an orator, unless some motive for it can be pointed out in the cause he is pleading ; that on the contrary the most inconvenient con- sequences would result from such an interpretation, and that it is therefore by their expressions, taken in their natural sense, that we ought to construe the meaning of Demosthenes, and to correct the statements of the grammarians. It fol- lows that Demosthenes was born either in the archonship of Dexitheus, or in the early part of the following year. We must not however conceal a new objection arising out of a mark of time first noticed bv Boeckh. in a Memoir on the chronology of the oration against Midias in the Berlin Transactions of 1818, where the same sagacity which de- tected the difficulty is employed in removing it, Demos- thenes mentions (in Aphob, i. p. 817) that his father was no sooner dead than his guardian Aphobus proceeded to take possession of the house, and to raise the portion which he was to have with the widow. This it is said he did when on the point of sailing as a trierarch to Corcyra (evret^^ el^j^ei/, €K7reiv [jLeWoov ek KepKvpav TpLYjpapyo^-) The question is, to what expedition this trierarchy relates. There are two which fall in the childhood of Demosthenes, and it must have been to one of them that he alludes. The first is that in which Timotheus reduced Corcyra under Athenian domi- nion, which Diodorus (xv. SQ) places in 01. 101. 1. The second commanded by Iphicrates is related by Diodorus under 01. 101. 3, which is confirmed by Demosth. in Timoth. p. 1186, where the archonship of Socratides is mentioned as the date of the expedition: and this is consistent with the account which fixes the birth of Demosthenes in 01. 99- 4. The time of the first expedition on the other hand will not conform to the chronology for which Boeckh contends, if it be placed in the spring of Ol. 101. 1., which is the date that Dodwell assigns to it. If however we suppose that Diodorus, as is not unusual with him, comprehended an event which belonged to the latter end of 01. 100. 4, within the following Olympic year, and that the father of Demosthenes died in the winter or early in the spring of 01. 100. 4, we may still retain the archonship of Dexitheus as the date of the orator's Vol. II. No. 5. 3 F