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I, on the other hand, consider that my first duty is to reply to the charge before the court by giving you a complete account of the facts. Afterwards, if you so desire, I shall be pleased to answer the remaining accusations made,This promise is never directly fulfilled, but Antiph. 6.33 ff. deal with the general conduct of the prosecution. as they will, I feel, turn to my own credit and advantage, and to the discomfiture of my opponents to whose impudence they are due. For it is indeed a strange fact, gentlemen:
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when they had the opportunity of avenging themselves on an enemy and doing the state a service by exposing and bringing home to me any public offence of which I had been guilty, as Choregus or otherwise, not one of them was able to prove that I had done your people any wrong, great or small.This is presumably a reference to the speaker’s δοκιμασία when elected a member of the βουλή in the preceding June. All magistrates had to submit to an inquiry into their general fitness to assume public office before they were installed. Yet at today’s trial, when they are prosecuting for prosecution to the charge before the court,Cf. Antiph. 5.11. There it is stated more explicitly that the διωμοσία ensured against irrelevant charges. they are seeking to achieve my downfall with a tissue of lies calculated to bring my public life into disrepute. If the state has in fact been wronged, they are compensating it not with redress, but with a mere accusation; while they are themselves demanding that reparation for a wrong which has been suffered by the state should be made to them in person.
