Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 1.djvu/253

 ÆSCHINES , therefore, the judges were necessarily obliged to attend, not to the nature of those offenses, but to the reputation of the state.

Some of our magistrates, observing this, framed a law (and its excellence is undeniable) expressly forbidding any man to be honored with a crown whose conduct had not yet been submitted to the legal examination. But notwithstanding all the precaution of the framers of this law, pretenses were still found of force sufficient to defeat its intention. Of these you are to be informed, lest you should be unwarily betrayed into error. Some of those who, in defiance of the laws, have moved that men who yet stood accountable for their conduct should be crowned are still influenced by some degree of decency (if this can with propriety be said of men who purpose resolutions directly subversive of the laws); they still seek to cast a kind of veil on their shame. Hence are they sometimes careful to express their resolutions in this manner: "that the man whose conduct is not yet submitted to examination shall be honored with a crown when his accounts have first been examined and approved." But this is no less injurious to the state: for by these crowns and public honors is his conduct prejudiced and his examination anticipated, while the author of such resolutions demonstrates to his hearers that his proposal is a violation of the laws, and that he is ashamed of his offense. But Ctesiphon my countrymen, hath at once broken through