Apart from that, it seems to me that such arguments offer you a choice, whether you think you ought to hear excuses and pleas from men who have done you harm, or whether you ought to have some ships. For if you accept the defendant’s plea, it will be clear to every future Council that their business is to find you plausible excuses, not to build you ships, with the result that your money will be spent, but there will be no ships for you.

But if, as the law says and as your oath enjoins, you sternly and absolutely reject their excuses, and make it clear that you have withheld the reward because they have not built the ships, then every Council, men of Athens, will deliver to you the ships duly built, because they will see that in your eyes everything else is of less consequence than the law. Now I shall show you clearly that no other human being is responsible for the shortage of ships; for the Council, having made the law null and void, elected this treasurer themselves.The treasurer should have been elected by the people; the Council, by appointing him illegally, made themselves responsible for his defalcations. The corruption of this passage is as old as Harpocration. Mss. have ἁυτῇ or ἁυτήν . With the latter and a comma after τοῦτον, editors have tried to translate ἐχειποτόνησεν voted itself guilty. Jurinus was the first to suggest αὐτὴ and to refer τοῦτον to the treasurer.

Again, with regard to the lawThe little that is known of this law is derived from Aeschines’ speech against TimarchusAeschin. 1 of prostitution, he tries to make out that we are insulting him and attacking him with baseless calumnies. He says too that if we believed the charges true, we ought to have faced him in the Court of the Thesmothetae, and asked a fine of a thousand drachmas if our charges had been proved false; as it is, we are trying to hoodwink you by accusations and idle abuse, and are confusing you by matters outside your jurisdiction.