HKB
purchase, so one who refuses to accept it [and is not corrupted] has conquered the bidder. In all, therefore, in which I am concerned, the city has suffered no defeat.
{248} The justification, then, with which I furnished the defendant for such a motion as he proposed with regard to me, consisted (along with many other points) of the facts which I have described, and others like them. I will now proceed to that justification which all of you supplied. For immediately after the battle, the People, who knew and had seen all that I did, and now stood in the very midst of the peril and terror, at a moment when it would not have been surprising if the majority had shown some harshness towards me--the People, I say, in the first place carried my proposals for ensuring the safety of the city; and all the measures undertaken for its protection--the disposition of the garrisons, the entrenchments, the funds for the fortifications--were all provided for by decrees which I proposed. And, in the second place, when the People chose a corn-commissioner, out of all Athens they elected me. {249} Subsequently all those who were interested in injuring me combined, and assailed me with indictments, prosecutions after audit, impeachments, and all such proceedings--not in their own names at first, but through the agency of men behind whom, they thought, they would best be screened against recognition. For you doubtless know and remember that during the early part of that period I was brought to trial every day; and neither the desperation of Sosicles, nor the dishonest misrepresentations of Philocrates,[n] nor the frenzy of Diondas and Melantus, nor any other expedient, was left untried by them against me. And in all these trials, thanks to the gods above all, but secondarily to you and the rest of the Athenians, I was acquitted--and justly; for such a decision is in accordance both with truth and with the credit of jurors who have taken their oath, and given a verdict in conformity with it. {250} So whenever I was impeached, and you absolved me and did not give the prosecutor the necessary fraction of the votes, you were voting that my policy was the best. Whenever I was acquitted upon an indictment, it was a proof that my motion and proposals were according to law. Whenever you set your seal to my accounts at an audit, you confessed in addition that I had acted throughout with uprightness and integrity. And this being so, what epithet was it fitting or just that Ctesiphon should apply to my actions? Was it not that which he saw applied by the People, and by juries on their oath, and ratified by Truth in the judgement of all men?
{251} 'Yes,' he replies, 'but Cephalus'[n] boast was a noble one--that he had never been indicted at all.' True, and a happy thing also it was for him. But why should one who has often been tried, but has never been convicted of crime, deserve to incur criticism any the more on that account? Yet in truth, men of Athens, so far as Aeschines is concerned, I too can make this noble boast that Cephalus made. For he has never yet preferred or prosecuted any indictment against me; so that by you at least, Aeschines, I am admitted to be no worse a citizen than Cephalus.