[61]
Then do you suppose that all these men are his inveterate
enemies merely because he collected this money from them? Is it not rather
because he said of one of them, in the hearing of all of you in the Assembly,
that he was a slave and born of slaves and ought by rights to pay the
contribution of one-sixth with the resident aliens1; and of another that
he had children by a harlot; of this man that his father had prostituted
himself; of that man that his mother had been on the streets; that he was making
an inventory of one man's peculations from the start of his career, that another
had done this or that, and that a third had committed every conceivable
crime—slandering them all in turn?
1 The metoeci paid tax on one-sixth of their capital; but possibly, as Mr. Wayte has suggested, they paid the same quotas as the citizen, plus an additional charge of one-sixth.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
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