and, treating your magistrates as his slaves, and teaching them to raise no word of opposition against him, he declared that if any of the generals should oppose him,1 he would bring suit to settle the claims of the speakers' platform as against those of the war office; for he said you owed more benefits to him from the platform than to the generals from the war office. And by drawing pay for empty places in the mercenary force,2 by stealing the pay of the troops, and by hiring out those ten thousand mercenaries to the Amphissians3 against my repeated protests and complaints in the assembly—when the mercenaries had thus been carried off, he rushed the city all unprepared into the mist of peril.
1 In connection with their service as commanders of the army and navy the generals had a considerable share in the responsibility for foreign relations.
2 The charge is that Demosthenes was in a conspiracy to pad the rolls.
3 The administration, by detaching this large body of mercenaries and sending them to the immediate aid of the Amphissians, gave Philip the opportunity to sweep them away before meeting the army of the Athenians and Thebans at Chaeronea.
Aeschines. Aeschines with an English translation by Charles Darwin Adams, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1919.
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