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Now if one of you should ask me, How do you know that we would vote against him? I should answer, Because you have spoken out and told me. And I will remind you when and where each man of you speaks and tells me: it is every time that Timarchus mounts the platform in the assembly; and the senate spoke out, when last year he was a member of the senate. For every time he used such words as walls or tower that needed repairing, or told how so-and-so had been taken off somewhere, you immediately laughed and shouted, and yourselves spoke the words that belong to those exploits of which he, to your knowledge, is guilty.Fortunately the modern reader is spared a knowledge of the double entente that made the vulgar listeners laugh when a man like Timarchus used the words τεῖχος, πύργος, and ἀπάγειν. Probably πύργος suggested the women’ s apartments, and ἀπάγειν may have suggested seduction.
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will pass over the most of these incidents and those which happened long ago, but I do wish to remind you of what took place at the very assembly in which I instituted this process against Timarchus.The first step in the process was for Aeschines, at a meeting of the assembly, formally to summon Timarchus to legal scrutiny (δοκιμασία) of his right to speak before the people.
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The Senate of the Areopagus appeared before the people in accordance with the resolution that Timarchus had introduced in the matter of the dwelling-houses on the Pnyx. The member of the Areopagus who spoke was Autolycus, a man whose life has been good and pious, by Zeus and Apollo, and worthy of that body.
