Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 1.djvu/283

 ÆSCHINES most scrupulous regard to justice. This man's father was Demosthenes of the Pæanian tribe, a citizen of repute (for I shall adhere strictly to truth). But how he stands as to family, with respect to his mother and her father, I must now explain. There was once in Athens a man called Cylon, who, by betraying Nymphæum in Pontus to the enemy, a city then possessed by us, was obliged to fly from his country in order to escape the sentence of death pronounced against him, and settled on the Bosphorus, where he obtained from the neighboring princes a tract of land called "The Gardens," and married a woman who indeed brought him a considerable fortune, but was by birth a Scythian; by her he had two daughters, whom he sent hither with a great quantity of wealth. One of them he settled—I shall not mention with whom, that I may not provoke the resentment of too many; the other Demosthenes the Pæanian married, in defiance of our laws, and from her is the present Demosthenes sprung—our turbulent and malicious informer. So that by his grandfather in the female line, he is an enemy to the state, for this grandfather was condemned to death by your ancestors; and by his mother he is a Scythian—one who assumes the language of Greece, but whose abandoned principles betray his barbarous descent.

And what has been his course of life? He first assumed the office of a triearch, and, having exhausted his paternal fortune by his ridiculous