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For all these reasons they left Aeschines at home, fearing that you might be undeceived and change your policy. Now to decline an appointment on affidavit with no reason alleged was a strange move and very suspicious. What do you mean? Are you declining the embassy? Are you not going to Macedonia to realize all those grand benefits which you announced yourself? However, he had to remain. What was to be done? He pleaded ill-health; and his brother, taking Execestus the physician with him, repaired to the council-house, made affidavit of the illness, and received the appointment himself.
125
But afterwards, when within five or six days the Phocians were destroyed, when Aeschines’ wages stopped as such things do, when Dercylus had returned from Chalcis and had informed you, at the assembly held at Peiraeus, of the destruction of the Phocians, when that news filled you with indignation on their account and alarm on your own, when you were resolving to bring in your women and children from the country, to reinstate the frontier fortresses, to fortify the Peiraeus, and to hold the festival of Heracles within the walls,—
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then at last, at that crisis, when the city was encompassed with confusion and terror, off marched this wise, clever, smooth-tongued gentleman, without waiting for Council or Assembly to reappoint him, on his embassy to the court of the chief malefactor. He forgot that he had sworn that he was too ill to travel; forgot that another ambassador had been chosen in his stead, and that the law visits such conduct with death;
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forgot that, with the Thebans not only holding all Boeotia but in possession of the territory of Phocis, it was a very odd thing for a man, who had solemnly announced that the Thebans had set a price upon his head, to walk straight into the middle of Thebes and the Theban encampment. Nevertheless, he was so excited, his appetite for moneymaking and bribe-taking was so keen, that he put aside and ignored all these obstacles, and off he went.
