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86 of them was for any length of time with the army. Demosthenes went back to Athens, on the pretext that he had to undertake the important public duty of choragus or choir-director for his tribe. It seems that he undertook this quite voluntarily, but his enemy hinted that he had merely done so to escape the hardships of campaigning. And he followed up the taunt with gross insult and outrage. The choir-director, as we have seen, usually appeared, when the ceremony was celebrated, in a special dress, and wore a crown; and Demosthenes had ordered for the occasion a particularly magnificent robe and a crown of gold. Meidias contrived to break into the embroiderer's shop where the dress had been prepared, and spoilt the finery in which Demosthenes was to show himself. He went further; he struck him on the face before the assembled audience, and, according to Demosthenes' own account, was the means of losing him the prize, which his chorus would have won. The spectators were indignant; and Meidias was convicted of the crime of sacrilege, as it would seem, on the very same day by an assembly held in the theatre. But the affair could not rest here. It was for a court of justice to decide how he was to be punished. Clearly, it was right that Demosthenes should prosecute him, and this he did. He was thirty-two years of age at the time. Meidias tried to defeat the prosecution by indicting Demosthenes on the charge of desertion of military service, on the ground that he had left the army in Eubœa and returned to Athens. The indictment came to nothing; but Demosthenes, it appears, was not decisively successful in his