Do you wish me to tell you the reason, men of Athens? He has his share in the proceeds of certain iniquities, and he also gets his pickings from the collection of revenue. In his insatiable greed he reaps a double harvest from the State. Now it is not an easier matter to make enemies of a multitude of petty offenders than of a few big offenders; neither of course is it a more popular thing to have an eye for the sins of the many than for the sins of the few. However, the reason is what I am telling you. He knows indeed that he is one of them, one of the criminals, but he thought you beneath his notice; and that was why he treated you in this way.

If you had confessed, men of Athens, that you are a nation of slaves and not of men who claim empire over others, you would never have put up with the insults which he repeatedly offered you in the marketplace, binding and arresting aliens and citizens alike, bawling from the platform in the Assembly, calling men slaves and slave-born who were better men than himself and of better birth, and asking if the jail was built for no object. I should certainly say it was, if your father danced his way out of it, fetters and all, at the procession of the Dionysia. All his other outrages it would be impossible to relate; they are too numerous. For all of them taken together you must exact vengeance today, and make an example of him to teach the rest to behave with more restraint.

Yes, it may be said, this is the sort of man he was in his public conduct, but there are other things which he has managed with credit. On the contrary, in every respect his behavior towards his fellow-citizens has been such that the story you have heard is the least of the reasons you have for hating him. What do you wish me to mention? How he repaired the processional ornaments? How he broke up the crowns? His success as a manufacturer of saucers? Why, for those performances alone, though he had committed no other fraud on the city, it seems to me he deserves not one but three sentences of death; for he is guilty of sacrilege, of impiety, of embezzlement, of every monstrous crime.