Embassy to Philip

and that he will lug in my speeches, and find fault with the peace which was brought about through Philocrates and myself, until he shall call out such bursts of applause from the jurors that I will not even face him in the court-room to defend myself when I render account of my service on the embassy, but will consider myself lucky if I get off with a moderate fine instead of being punished with death.

For, under the impression that he is hurting me with reference to the accounting which I am about to render for my service on the embassy, he says that when the other day he himself was describing the boy Alexander, telling how at a certain banquet of ours he played the cithara, reciting certain passages in which there were thrusts at another boy, and when he reported to the senate what he himself …

Those who were invited and were present at the banquet, including the ambassadors from other Hellenic states, were not less than two hundred.

And they put me on trial, not as an ambassador, but as a surety for Philip and the peace;

and we have not come back from the embassy changed men, but the same men that you yourselves sent out.

So on the strength of his policy at that time, and of the sample he had exhibited of his conduct, he was actually appointed as one of the ambassadors when you were induced by Aristodemus, Neoptolemus, Ctesiphon and others, who had brought entirely misleading reports from Macedonia, to send an embassy to negotiate peace with Philip.

However, by reason of the persistent misconduct of these men, and their disobedience to instructions, we came back from the embassy for the oaths—that is the embassy which is the subject of the present scrutiny—without having realized any single one, great or small, of the advantages which were promised or expected when you approved the peace,—with nothing but deception and disappointment.

And until after our return from the first embassy I at least, men of Athens, had no suspicion that he was corrupt and had already sold himself.