Free women could be seen crouching at the doors in terror inquiring for the safety of
 their husbands, fathers or brothers, offering a spectacle degrading to themselves and to
 the city. The men who had outlived their stength and were advanced in life, exempt by law
 from service in the field, could be seen throughout the city, now on the threshold of the
 grave, wretchedly scurrying with their cloaks pinned double round them. Many sufferings were being visited upon the city; every citizen had felt misfortune at
 its worst; but the sight which would most surely have stirred the onlooker and moved him
 to tears over the sorrows of Athens was to see
 the people vote that slaves should be released, that aliens should become Athenians and
 the disfranchised regain their rights For this proposal
 of Hyperides compare Lyc. 1.16 and note. : the nation
 that once proudly claimed to be indigenous and free. The city had suffered a change
 indeed. She who used once to champion the freedom of her fellow Greeks was now content if she
 could safely meet the dangers that her own defence entailed. In the past she had ruled a
 wide extent of foreign land; now she was disputing with Macedon for her own. The people whom Lacedaemonians and Peloponnesians,
 whom the Greeks of Asia used once to summon to
 their help, Two notable occasions when Athens sent help to Sparta were the Third Messenian War ( 464 B.C.)
 and the campaign of Mantinea ( 362 B.C.). She had assisted the Asiatic Greeks in the revolt of
 Aristagoras (c. 498 B.C.) and at the time of the Delian
 League. were now entreating men of Andros , Ceos , Troezen and Epidaurus to send them aid. Therefore, gentlemen, if at a time of fears like these, a time of such great danger and
 disgrace, there was a deserter from the city, a mall who neither took up arms in his
 country’s defence nor submitted his person to the generals for enrollment but ran away and
 betrayed the safety of the people, what patriotic juryman with any scruples would vote for
 his acquittal? What advocate summoned into court would help a traitor to his city? He had
 not even the grace to share our grief at the misfortunes of his country, and he has made
 no contribution towards the defence of Athens 
 and our democracy. Yet men of every age offered their services for the city’s defence on that occasion when
 the land was giving up its trees, the dead their gravestones, and the temples arms. Some
 set themselves to building walls, others to making ditches and palisades. Not a man in the
 city was idle. Leocrates did not offer himself to be enrolled for a single one of these
 tasks.