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393 On the Birth-Year of Demosthenes. 393 appear to be at all absurd or extravagant. A later writer (Schoemann De comitiis Atheniensium) likewise adopts it, though he does not carry it to the same extent. He observes (p. 77) : rotundos numeros ponit, cum baud dubie et aliquot mensibus major fuerit septennio, cum patre orbatus est, et sub tutela fuerit itidem mensibus aliquot diutius, quam de- cennium. But the real nature of Corsini**s argument cannot be understood from the passages quoted by Mr CUnton, and if his reasoning is weak, his error certainly does not consist in miscalculation. His object is to prove against Sigonius, that the age at which an Athenian citizen became an Ephebus, and, if an orphan, was admitted into possession of his estate, was not eighteen but nineteen, and that the previous ex- amination and enrolment took place on the completion, not in the course of the eighteenth year. His argument^ if I am not mistaken, is in substance this : Demosthenes, according to his own account, became master of his estate in the last month of Polyzelus : this must have happened immediately after he had attained the legal age : but this could not be less than eighteen complete, because he himself speaks of two periods of seven and of ten years, each of which must be taken to be something short of the real time, which he had no need to express more exactly : he was therefore born in the last month of Dexitheus, and thus by his own testimony confirms the date given by the Pseudo-Plutarch. The validity of this argument depends on the truth of the assumptions on which it is founded. It assumes in the first place that the two whole numbers mentioned by De- mosthenes are each less, not greater than the real time : secondly, that this minority ended in the year of Polyzelus, and thirdly that it ended as soon as he had completed his eighteenth year. Now all these are certainly questionable propositions, and Mr Clinton denies every one of them. In the first place as to the two periods, Mr Clinton observes, that in these detached fitinibers of Demosthenes we are not to take the sum of the two, or to suppose seventeen years complete : but he admits that the phrase tirT erwv ovra is ambiguous, and only contends that the hypothetical case put by the orator (in Aphob. p. 833) : ei KarcXetCpOtjv fxev mrwaw, e^ ETJ] ^c Trpoacrpo-n-eueiiv, does not necessarily