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§§ 12—17. The plaintiff's claim to a sum of banking-stock alleged to have been held by the defendant may be proved groundless by many arguments: (1) Plaintiff's father is entered in the lease, not as creditor on account of banking-stock assigned to defendant, but actually as debtor to the bank. (2) On the partition of the property, plaintiff put in no claim to such stock. (3) After the termination of defendant's lease of the bank, plaintiff let it to others for the same sum and no less; and did not specially transfer to them any banking-stock besides. (4) The plaintiff during the life of his mother, who was perfectly familiar with all these details, made no demand on the defendant; it was only when she died that he set up a fraudulent claim, not for any banking-stock as now, but for a sum of 3000 dr. The claim was submitted to the arbitration of some relatives of the plaintiff, and upon their award the defendant for peace and quietness' sake paid the money and a second time received from the plaintiff a release from all his claims. πολλὰ—ἐπιδεικνύναι Or. 20 § 163 πολλὰ δ᾽ ἄν τις ἔχοι λέγειν ἔτι καὶ διεξιέναι. σημεῖα...τεκμήριον Or. 54 § 9. συκοφαντεῖν κ.τ.λ. Kennedy: ‘This claim of the plaintiff's to a sum of banking-stock is false and fraudulent.’ — ἐγκαλοῦντ᾽ ἀφορμὴν, the first distinct reference in the speech to the nature of the plaintiff's case. He alleges that the defendant had a grant of capital from Pasion and had appropriated it. τουτονὶ...τουτῳί ..τοῦτον The first two refer to the defendant, the third to the plaintiff, Apollodorus. The ambiguity arising from a similar pronoun being applied to two different persons, would be readily dispelled by the orator's delivery. Cf. § 42 n. προσοφείλοντα sc. 11 talents, §§ 4—6.—τῇ νομῇ, § 8 fin. μισθῶν ἑτέροις κ.τ.λ. i.e. to Xenon and the others in § 13. The argument is: assume the defendant defrauded the plaintiff of bank-stock amounting to 20 talents. Then the stock in question could not have formed part of the business when the plaintiff let it to the later lessees. The plaintiff then should either have let it to them at lower terms than to the defendant, or have handed over to the bank an equivalent to the stock alleged to be missing. He did neither; he made no fresh transfer and he charged them the same rent. Therefore the property must have been in the same condition as when the defendant originally leased it from the plaintiff's father.— The context compels us to make Apollodorus the subject of the sentence μισθῶν—φανήσεται, but the bank, it will be remembered, became the property not of Apollodorus, but of Pasicles, when the latter came of age and Phormion's lease expired; we must therefore conclude that the elder brother acted as agent on behalf of his less experienced younger brother. τοῦ ἴσου ἀργυρίου viz. 2tal. 40mna. for the whole business, 1tal. for the shield-manufactory, and 1tal. 40mna. (= 100mna.) for the bank (cf. § 11). It has been suggested that τοῦ ἴσου ἀργυρίου is a false statement, or an oratorical exaggeration, but a careful consideration of §§ 11 and 37 shows that this is not the case.
Select Private Orations of Demosthenes, Part II. J. E. Sandys, Litt. D., and F. A. Paley, M.A., LL.D. 1910. Cambridge University Press.
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