ÆSCHINES
defense he calls up his accomplices in corruption as his advocates, then imagine that you see the great benefactors of your country in this place from whence I speak, arrayed against the villainy of those men: Solon, the man who adorned our free constitution with the noblest laws, the philosopher, the renowned legislator, entreating you, with that decent gravity which distinguished his character, by no means to pay a greater regard to the speeches of Demosthenes than to your oaths and laws: Aristides, who was suffered to prescribe to the Greeks their several subsidies, whose daughters received their portions from the people at his decease, roused to indignation at this insult on public justice, and asking whether you are not ashamed, that when your fathers banished Arthmius the Zelian, who brought in gold from Persia; when they were scarcely restrained from killing a man connected with the people in the most sacred ties, and by public proclamation forbade him to appear in Athens, or in any part of the Athenian territory; yet you are going to crown Demosthenes with a golden crown, who did not bring in gold from Persia, but received bribes himself, and still possesses them. And can you imagine but that Themistocles, and those who fell at Marathon, and those who died at Platæa, and the very sepulchers of our ancestors, must groan if you confer a crown on this man, who confessedly united with the Barbarians against the Greeks?
And now bear witness for me, thou earth, thou
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