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Rh a man of intelligence, and perfectly open to reason. Practice, too, made him tolerably well acquainted with his country's laws. It is the greatest mistake to conceive of Athens as "a fierce democracy." Her citizens were for the most part moderately-cultivated persons, of a tolerant temper, and willing to obey the laws and the constitution. A successful Athenian advocate must have come up to a rather high standard; and if his invective was sometimes coarse and offensively personal, it must have been set off by a certain amount of wit, and have been accompanied with acute reasoning.

Much of the litigation at Athens arose out of bottomry cases—that is, loans of money on the security of a ship or of its cargo. Business of this kind was transacted on a great scale; and as the risk was considerable, the interest charged was high—as much sometimes as thirty per cent. There seem to have been endless trickeries connected with it. One of Demosthenes' speeches, for instance, was on behalf of two joint lenders who had advanced some money on the security of a wine cargo. Two brothers, merchants of Phaselis in Pamphylia, were the borrowers. Phaselis, it appears, had a very bad commercial reputation; and there were said to be more actions brought against its traders at Athens than against all the other traders put together. In this case Demosthenes' client stated that the borrowers of his money had broken their agreement—"that they had not shipped the stipulated quantity of wine; that they had raised a further loan on the same security; that they had not purchased a sufficient return