71
Is it right, when the laws demand that the orator or general who expects to get the people's confidence shall observe the laws in begetting children, shall own land within our boundaries, shall give all the lawful pledges and only thus lay claim to be the people's leader, that you should have sold the land inherited from your father or be claiming as yours children which are not your own, thus breaking the laws which govern oaths in court,A reference to the oath whereby a man called down imprecations on his children, swearing that he was not guilty of a certain action. Demosthenes had lost his only child, a daughter, in 336 (Aeschin. 3.77); and if he had other children now, they were adopted or by a hetaera. Cf. Athen. 13.592 e. and be ordering others to fight when you deserted the citizens' ranks yourself?
72
What do you think it is, Athenians, that makes cities vary between good and evil fortunes? You will find only one cause: the counsellors and leaders. Take Thebes. It was a city; it became supreme. Under what leaders and generals? All the older men, on whose authority I shall give you the story, would admit that it was when Pelopidas,Pelopidas and Epaminondas were the chief Theban generals during their city's period of greatness (371-362 B.C.). In 371 they defeated Sparta at Leuctra and, in response to an appeal from the Arcadians who then rose against Sparta, entered the Peloponnese in 370. Here they refounded the town of Messene which the Spartans had destroyed at the end of the 8th century B.C. (Dio. Sic. 15.56 and Dio. Sic. 15.62-66). Epaminondas conducted three further invasions of the Peloponnese, penetrating Laconia, but never actually taking Sparta. It was probably during the second of these that he founded Megalopolis, the new capital of Arcadia; in the third he was killed at Mantinea (362 B.C.). so they have it,
