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[3]
For you are the worst people for taking away the offices that fall to your class, and
for enacting laws about them if someone serves twice as commissioner of police1 or something of the
sort, but you allow the same men to be generals all the time.2 There is perhaps some excuse for allowing
those engaged in the active services to continue, but to allow the others, who, though
doing nothing, have an endless tenure of office and are themselves endlessly benefited is
folly.3 Instead, you ought to bring in some of your own number, and
there are not a few of you. For if you set up a standard, as it were, anyone who is worth
anything will thereafter come forward of his own accord.
1 These ἀστυνόμοι were ten in number, five each for Athens and the Peiraeus; they were responsible for the streets but not for the markets. Cf. Aristot. Ath. Pol. 50.2.
2 The last statement is confirmed by Aristot. Ath. Pol. 62.3.
3 There is a touch of tragedy and the mysteries in the diction. Perhaps better: “hold an unserviceable post to the service of which they have themselves been consecrated.” For similar irony cf. Dem. 13.19 τελεσθῆναι στρατηγός, “to be consecrated general.”
Demosthenes with an English translation by Norman W. DeWitt, Ph.D., and Norman J. DeWitt, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1949.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.