joined between Aeschines and Demosthenes for one of the most
celebrated forensic contests in history. Losing the case Aeschines
went into banishment. He died at Samos, B.C. 314, in his
seventy-fifth year. He is generally ranked next to Demosthenes among
Greek orators. For the following from the oration of Aeschines, the
reader is under obligations to Professor Jebb's admirable translation.


AGAINST CROWNING DEMOSTHENES (Against Ktesiphon)

Our days have not fallen on the common chances of mortal life. We
have been set to bequeath a story of marvels to posterity. Is not
the king of Persia, he who cut through Athos, and bridged the
Hellespont, he who demands earth and water from the Greeks, he who
in his letters presumes to style himself lord of all men from the
sunrise to the sunset, is he not struggling at this hour, no longer
for authority over others, but for his own life? Do you not see the
men who delivered the Delphian temple invested not only with that
glory but with the leadership against Persia? While Thebes--
Thebes, our neighbor city--has been in one day swept from the face
of Greece--justly it may be in so far as her general policy was
erroneous, yet in consequence of a folly which was no accident, but
the judgment of heaven. The unfortunate Lacedaemonians, though they
did but touch this affair in its first phase by the occupation of
the temple,--they who once claimed the leadership of Greece,--
are now to be sent to Alexander in Asia to give hostages, to parade
their disasters, and to hear their own and their country's doom from
his lips, when they have been judged by the clemency of the master
they provoked. Our city, the common asylum of the Greeks, from
which, of old, embassies used to come from all Greece to obtain