[205]
When they caught
Themistocles presumptuously setting himself above the people, they banished him
from Athens, and found him guilty of
siding with the Medes. Because Cimon had dislocated the ancestral constitution
by his personal efforts, they acquitted him by a majority of three votes only on
the capital charge, and made him pay fifty talents. Such was their attitude to
the men who had rendered those signal services. And they were right; they would
not sell to those men their own freedom and their pride in their own
achievements;1 they honored them as long as they did
right, but resisted them when they tried to do wrong.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
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