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See what this amounts to. He exacts a toll of one-thirtieth from exporters of corn from his country. Now from the Bosporus there come to Athens about four hundred thousand bushels; the figures can be checked by the books of the grain commissioners. So for each three hundred thousand bushels he makes us a present of ten thousand bushels, and for the remaining hundred thousand a present of roughly three thousand.To help his audience in this piece of mental arithmetic, Demosthenes divides his 400,000 into two parts, of 300,000 (of which the thirtieth is easily calculated) and of 100,000, the thirtieth of which is 3333 1/3 or roughly 3000. It should be remembered that the medimnus is more strictly about a bushel and a half.
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Now, so little danger is there of his depriving our state of this gift, that he has opened another depot at Theudosia, which our merchants say is not at all inferior to the Bosporus,Here not the district, but the capital, Panticapaeum, the modern Kertch. Sixty miles west lies Theudosia (Kaffa), an ancient colony of Miletus. and there, too, he has granted us the same exemption. I omit much that might be said about the other benefits conferred upon you by this prince and also by his ancestors, but the year before last, when there was a universal shortage of grain, he not only sent enough for your needs, but such a quantity in addition that Callisthenes had a surplus of fifteen talents of silver to dispose of.Callisthenes, as σιτώνηςor Food Controller (an office held by Demosthenes himself,Dem. 18.248), received so much corn from Leucon that, after supplying the needs of Athens, he was able to make 16 talents for the treasury by selling the surplus elsewhere.
