Against Demosthenes (41-45)

Are you not ashamed, Athenians, that you should think our speeches the only evidence you have on which to determine the punishment of Demosthenes? Do you not know yourselves that this man is open to bribes and is both a robber and a traitor to his friends that neither he nor the fortune which has gone with him is fit for the city? Are there any decrees or any laws which have not brought him money?

Are there any people in the court who were among those included in the three hundred when Demosthenes brought in his law concerning the trierarchs?[*] Then tell your neighbors that he accepted three talents and used to alter and re-draft the law for every sitting of the Assembly, in some cases taking money over points for which he had been paid already, in others failing to honor the sales which he had made.

Really, gentlemen, tell me: do you think he got nothing for proposing that Diphilus[*] should have meals at the Prytaneum or for that statue to be put up in the market? Nothing for conferring Athenian citizenship on Chaerephilus, Phidon, Pamphilus, and Phidippus, or again on Epigenes and Conon the bankers? Nothing for putting up in the market bronze statues of Berisades, Satyrus and Gorgippus the tyrants from the Pontus, from whom he receives a thousand medimni of wheat a year—this man who will presently tell you that there is nowhere for him to take refuge.

Did he get nothing for proposing that Taurosthenes[*] should become an Athenian, though he had enslaved his fellow citizens and, with his brother Callias, betrayed the whole of Euboea to Philip? Taurosthenes whom the laws forbid to set foot on Athenian soil, providing that if he does so he shall be liable to the same penalties as an exile who returns after being sentenced by the Areopagus. This was the man who Demosthenes the democrat proposed should be your fellow citizen.

Is there any need then for me to call up witnesses for you so far as these men are concerned or any of the others whom he has proposed as proxeni or citizens? I ask you in Athena's name: do you imagine that when he gladly accepts silver he would refuse twenty talents of gold? Do you think that though he takes money in dribblets, he would not accept as a lump sum so great a fee, or that the Areopagus, which spent six months inquiring over Demosthenes, Demades, and Cephisophon,[*] has been unjust over the reports submitted to you?