that ten thousand persons have been thus proclaimed on ten thousand
different occasions, and that my own name has often been so proclaimed
before. But, in Heaven's name, Aeschines, are you so perverse and stupid,
that you cannot grasp the fact that the recipient of the crown feels the
same pride wherever the crown is proclaimed, and that it is for the
benefit of those who confer it that the proclamation is made in the
theatre? For those who hear are stimulated to do good service to the
State, and commend those who return gratitude for such service even more
than they commend the recipient of the crown. That is why the city has
enacted this law. (_To the clerk_.) Take the law itself and read it.

[_The law is read_.]

{121} Do you hear, Aeschines, the plain words of the law? 'Except such as
the People or the Council shall resolve so to proclaim. But let these be
proclaimed.' Why, wretched man, do you lay this dishonest charge? Why do
you invent false arguments? Why do you not take hellebore[n] to cure you?
What? Are you not ashamed to bring a case founded upon envy, not upon any
crime--to alter some of the laws, and to leave out parts of others, when
they ought surely, in justice, to be read entire to those who have sworn
to give their votes in accordance with the laws? {122} And then, while you
act in this way, you enumerate the qualities which should be found in a
friend of the People, as if you had contracted for a statue, and
discovered on receiving it that it had not the features required by the
contract; or as if a friend of the People was known by a definition, and
not by his works and his political measures! And you shout out
expressions, proper and improper, like a reveller on a cart[n]--
expressions which apply to you and your house, not to me. I will add this
also, men of Athens. {123} The difference between abuse and accusation is,
I imagine, that an accusation is founded upon crimes, for which the
penalties are assigned by law; abuse, upon such slanders as their own
character leads enemies to utter about one another. And I conceive that
our forefathers built these courts of law, not that we might assemble you
here and revile one another with improper expressions suggested by our
adversary's private life, but that we might convict any one who happens to
have committed some crime against the State. {124} Aeschines knew this as
well as I; and yet he chose to make a ribald attack instead of an
accusation. At the same time, it is not fair that he should go off without
getting as much as he gives, even in this respect; and when I have asked
him one question, I will at once proceed to the attack. Are we to call
you, Aeschines, the enemy of the State, or of myself? Of myself, of
course. What? And when you might have exacted the penalty from me, on
behalf of your fellow countrymen, according to the laws--at public
examinations, by indictment, by all other forms of trial--did you always
omit to do so? {125} And yet to-day, when I am unassailable upon every
ground--on the ground of law, of lapse of time, of the statutable
limit,[n] of the many previous trials which I have undergone upon every
charge, without having once been convicted of any crime against you to
this day--and when the city must necessarily share to a greater or smaller
degree in the glory of acts which were really acts of the people, have you
confronted me upon such an issue as this? Take care lest, while you
profess to be _my_ enemy, you prove to be the enemy of your fellow
countrymen!

{126} Since then I have shown you all what is the vote which religion and
justice demand of you, I am now obliged, it would seem, by the slanders
which he has uttered (though I am no lover of abuse) to reply to his many
falsehoods by saying just what is absolutely necessary about himself, and
showing who he is, and whence he is sprung, that he so lightly begins to
use bad language, pulling to pieces certain expressions of mine, when he
has himself used expressions which any respectable man would have shrunk
from uttering; {127} for if the accuser were Aeacus or Rhadamanthus or
Minos,[n] instead of a scandal-monger,[n] an old hand in the
marketplace,[n] a pestilent clerk, I do not believe that he would have