Sir Richard C. Jebb, Selections from the Attic Orators

ἀκριβέστερον ‘with more subtlety’ — referring especially to the distinction which he proceeds to draw between πράκτορες τῶν ἀκουσίων and τῶν παθημάτων αἴτιοι (§ 6). The accuser, in his second speech (γ. § 3), says, μὴ ἔργα φανερὰ ὑπὸ πονηρᾶς λόγων ἀκριβείας (‘a quibbling subtlety’) πεισθέντες ψευδῆ τὴν ἀλήθειαν τῶν πραχθέντων ἡγήσησθε.

μὴ...τὴν κρίσιν ποιήσασθαι With the vulg., μὴ διὰ τὰς προειρημένας τύχας ἀποδεξαμένους, κ.τ.λ., we can only render: ‘I ask you to entertain my defence, and not to give your judgment — under the influence of those mischances to which I have referred — on grounds of opinion rather than of fact’. But the position of ἀποδεξαμένους...ἀπολογίαν, inserted between μή and ποιήσασθαι, is then intolerable. Blass conjectures ἴσα ταῖς προειρημέναις τύχαις: i.e. ‘I beg you not to receive my defence in the spirit — not to view them in the light — of the mischances’, etc. The objections are (1) the phrase ἴσα ταῖς... τύχαις, which surely will not yield such a sense: (2) the necessarily favourable sense of ἀποδεξαμένους. I propose, retaining διὰ...τὰς τύχας, to insert ἧττόν τι before ἀποδεξαμένους: ‘I beg you not to entertain my defence the less favourably on account of the mischances to which I have referred’. See p. 55, § 8, for another instance in which ἧττον seems to have dropped out. — An alternative remedy would be to change ἀποδεξαμένους for some partic. of opposite meaning (‘having rejected’); but neither ἀποδοκιμάσαντας nor ἀπωσαμένους is palaeographically probable.

πρὸς τῶν λέγειν δυν ‘is on the side of’, ‘favours’, those who can speak. Eur. Alc. 57, πρὸς τῶν ἐχόντων, Φοῖβε, τὸν νόμον τίθης, ‘for the rich’ — in their interest.