But I would like to reckon up in your presence, fellow citizens, with the author of this motion, the benefactions for which he calls on you to crown Demosthenes. For if, Ctesiphon, you propose to cite that which you made the beginning of your motion, that he did good work in excavating the trenches around the walls, I am astonished at you. For to have been responsible for the necessity of doing the work at all involves an accusation greater than is the credit for having done it well. Indeed, it is not for surrounding the walls with palisades, and not for tearing down the public tombs1 that the statesman of clean record ought to ask reward, but for having been responsible for some good to the city.
1 We learn from the orator Lycurgus （Lyc. Against Leocrates 44） that in the past to fortify the city immediately after Chaeronea the very tombs were made to yield stones, as they had done in the hurried fortifying by Themistocles after the Persian wars （Thuc. 1.93.1）. Aeschines wrongly implies that these hurried emergency measures were a part of the work that was done later in a thorough manner under Demosthenes' direction.
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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