On The Crown   

in your perversity, you demand an account from me. {246} No; but every
investigation that can be made as regards those duties for which an orator
should be held responsible, I bid you make. I crave no mercy. And what are
those duties? To discern events in their beginnings, to foresee what is
coming, and to forewarn others. These things I have done. Again, it is his
duty to reduce to the smallest possible compass, wherever he finds them,
the slowness, the hesitation, the ignorance, the contentiousness, which
are the errors inseparably connected with the constitution of all city-
states; while, on the other hand, he must stimulate men to unity,
friendship, and eagerness to perform their duty. All these things I have
done, and no one can discover any dereliction of duty on my part at any
time. {247} If one were to ask any person whatever, by what means Philip
had accomplished the majority of his successes, every one would reply that
it was by means of his army, and by giving presents and corrupting those
in charge of affairs. Now I had no control or command of the forces:
neither, then, does the responsibility for anything that was done in that
sphere concern me. And further, in the matter of being or not being
corrupted by bribes, I have defeated Philip. For just as the bidder has
conquered one who accepts his money, if he effects his purchase, so one
who refuses to accept it [and is not corrupted] has conquered the bidder.
In all, therefore, in which I am concerned, the city has suffered no
defeat.

{248} The justification, then, with which I furnished the defendant for
such a motion as he proposed with regard to me, consisted (along with many
other points) of the facts which I have described, and others like them. I
will now proceed to that justification which all of you supplied. For
immediately after the battle, the People, who knew and had seen all that I
did, and now stood in the very midst of the peril and terror, at a moment
when it would not have been surprising if the majority had shown some
harshness towards me--the People, I say, in the first place carried my
proposals for ensuring the safety of the city; and all the measures
undertaken for its protection--the disposition of the garrisons, the
entrenchments, the funds for the fortifications--were all provided for by
decrees which I proposed. And, in the second place, when the People chose
a corn-commissioner, out of all Athens they elected me. {249} Subsequently
all those who were interested in injuring me combined, and assailed me
with indictments, prosecutions after audit, impeachments, and all such
proceedings--not in their own names at first, but through the agency of
men behind whom, they thought, they would best be screened against
recognition. For you doubtless know and remember that during the early
part of that period I was brought to trial every day; and neither the
desperation of Sosicles, nor the dishonest misrepresentations of
Philocrates,[n] nor the frenzy of Diondas and Melantus, nor any other
expedient, was left untried by them against me. And in all these trials,
thanks to the gods above all, but secondarily to you and the rest of the
Athenians, I was acquitted--and justly; for such a decision is in
accordance both with truth and with the credit of jurors who have taken
their oath, and given a verdict in conformity with it. {250} So whenever I
was impeached, and you absolved me and did not give the prosecutor the
necessary fraction of the votes, you were voting that my policy was the
best. Whenever I was acquitted upon an indictment, it was a proof that my
motion and proposals were according to law. Whenever you set your seal to
my accounts at an audit, you confessed in addition that I had acted
throughout with uprightness and integrity. And this being so, what epithet
was it fitting or just that Ctesiphon should apply to my actions? Was it
not that which he saw applied by the People, and by juries on their oath,
and ratified by Truth in the judgement of all men?

{251} 'Yes,' he replies, 'but Cephalus'[n] boast was a noble one--that he
had never been indicted at all.' True, and a happy thing also it was for
him. But why should one who has often been tried, but has never been
convicted of crime, deserve to incur criticism any the more on that
account? Yet in truth, men of Athens, so far as Aeschines is concerned, I