Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 1.djvu/166

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS performed; but his name was hung up on the statues of the Eponymi with an inscription asserting, to his eternal dishonor, that he had not paid the contribution, which he promised in public, for his country's service. Who can now wonder, judges, that he deceived me, a private individual, when he so notoriously deluded you all in your common assembly? Of this transaction you shall now hear the proofs.

Such and so splendid have been the services which Dicæogenes, possessed of so large a fortune, has performed for the city. You perceive, too, in what manner he conducts himself toward his relations; some of whom he has deprived, as far as he was able, of their property; others he has basely neglected, and forced, through the want of mere necessaries to enter into the service of some foreign power. All Athens saw his mother sitting in the temple of Illithyia, and heard her accuse him of a crime which I blush to relate, but which he blushed not to commit. As to his friends, he has now incurred the violent hatred of Melas the Egyptian, who had been fond of him in his early youth, by refusing to pay him a sum of money which he had borrowed; his other companions he had either defrauded of sums which they lent him, or has failed to perform his promise of giving them part of his plunder if he succeeded in his cause.

Yet our ancestors, judges, who first acquired this estate, and left it to their descendants, conducted all the public games, contributed  106