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408 408 On the Birth-Year of Demosthenes. birth, who would then have been 1 or 7^ ^t his father's death ; and this date for the first expedition is more conform- able with Xenophon''s narrative, which connects the conquest of Corcyra with the attempt of Sphodrias on the Piraeus, which was made in 01. 100. S, though Diodorus relates it also under 01. 100. 4. So far perhaps this solution of the difficulty may appear satisfactory : but the author has not been equally successful with regard to another date, which stands in the way of the foregoing calculation, that of the battle of Naxos. He has seen the necessity of placing this event also a year earlier than the time which Dodwell assigns to it, Boedromion of 01. 101. 1 : for it happened in the autumn preceding the expedition to Corcyra. But he has not explained how his own date, 01. 100. 4, is to be reconciled with Xenophon''s narrative (Hell. v. 4. 50), which, as Mr Clinton observes (F. A. p. 106), clearly implies that the bat- tle was fought in the autumn following the spring in which Cleombrotus was frustrated in his attempt to invade Boeotia (01. 100. 4). The allusion to Corcyra therefore still requires some further explanation to reconcile it with Boeckh''s opinion, and if referred to the first expedition must at present be con- sidered as a confirmation of Mr Clinton^s. If however the arguments derived from the Athenian institutions have any weight, they cannot be overthrown by a single obscure allusion which appears to contradict them: and we may therefore still with unabated confidence proceed to examine, whether the account which Demosthenes gives of his own age in the oration against Midias, can be recon- ciled with the conclusion to which they have led us. The orator there says (p. 564), that he is thirty-two years old: ovo Koi TpiciKovTa €Trj yeyova* According to Dionysius he wrote these words in the year of Callimachus 01. 107. 4, which is conformable to the date 01. QQ. 4, for the orator's birth, or rather is evidently the ground of it. Wolf (Proleg. ad Lept. p. cviii), though he differs from Dionysius by four years as to the orator's birth, and Mr Clinton, adopt the same date for the oration, and on the same ground : that it contains allusions to an event which occurred in the archonship of Callimachus, the Olynthian war. Both suppose the orator, in describing his age, to speak as if the facts of the case were