168
For, under the impression that he is hurting me with reference to the accounting which I am about to render for my service on the embassy,See the Introduction to Aeschin. 2. he says that when the other day he himself was describing the boy Alexander, telling how at a certain banquet of ours he played the cithara, reciting certain passages in which there were thrusts at another boy, and when he reported to the senate what he himself happened to know about the incident, I got angry at his jests at the expense of the boy,The words of double meaning that Aeschines says Demosthenes applied to the boy Alexander would be connected with the story of this playing and reciting. as though I were not merely a member of the embassy, but one of the boy’ s own family.
169
Now I naturally have had no conversation with Alexander, because of his youth, but Philip I do praise now because of his auspicious words, and if in what he does toward us in the future he shall fulfil the promise of what he now says, he will make praise of him a safe and easy thing. I did, indeed, rebuke Demosthenes in the senate-chamber, not because I was counting the favor of the boy, but because I felt that if you should listen to such words as his, the city would show itself as ill-behaved as the speaker.
170
But, fellow citizens, I beg you not to accept their irrelevant pleas at all, in the first place for the sake of the oaths which you have sworn, in the second place that you may not be misled by a fellow who makes a trade of the manipulation of words. But I will go back a little way for your instruction. Demosthenes, after he had spent his patrimony, went up and down the city, hunting rich young fellows whose fathers were dead, and whose mothers were administering their property. I will omit many instances, and will mention only one of those who were outrageously treated.
