Excerpt from The De Corona of Demosthenes: With English Notes We cannot but think the proposal of this decree had fur ther objects than merely to honor the orator. We may well Suppose it included a strong political move on the side of the Constitutional party, who had always opposed and (so far as they could) resisted the power of Macedon. To laud Demosthenes and his policy was really to censure Philip nor was it only to censure Philip, but also to stigmatize the whole Macedonian party, _whose numbers were very strong in the Public Assembly of Athens, of which party zeschines may be called the political leader. Ctesiphon, it is to be noticed, was quite an unknown man. And yet his name is attached to this important decree. How can this be ex plained except by the Supposition that he was put forward by other men of greater power and distinction? Thecon stitutional party, in fact, were throwing down a challenge to their Opponents and their action would certainly lead to a public trial and contest. N ow the fact that Ctesiphon was an unknown and insignificant person would be useful to them in two ways for fighting their battle of politics. First, it would look as if the merits of Philip's chief antago nist were such as to call forth the most disinterested praises, uttered by an humble voice in the ranks with honest, un taught enthusiasm. N ext, ' in attacking this decree, the prosecutor could get no hold on the character of its proposer. He would not be able to denounce the decree as proposed by a well-known demagogue, by a man of notorious charac ter, whose very advocacy was enough to condemn his cause. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.