next

I have never, fellow citizens, brought indictment against any Athenian, nor vexed any man when he was rendering account of his office1; but in all such matters I have, as I believe, shown myself a quiet and modest man.2 But when I saw that the city was being seriously injured by the defendant, Timarchus, who, though disqualified by law, was speaking in your assemblies,3 and when I myself was made a victim of his blackmailing attack—the nature of the attack I will show in the course of my speech—

1 The Athenian Constitution provided for rigid auditing of the accounts of all officials at the close of their year of office, and gave full opportunity to any citizen to bring charges against any act of their administration. Such opportunity might easily be used for malicious or blackmailing attack

2 A quiet citizen, as distinguished from the professional political blackmailer, συκοφάντης

3 As the speech proceeds we shall see that Aeschines declares that Timarchus was guilty of immoral practices that disqualified him from speaking before the people.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1919)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (7 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: