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[4]
The portion they allow you is to have a laugh
and to raise a hubbub and now and then to have a hope, but they would not want you to get
or acquire for the State any benefit in the proper sense of the word. Yes, and on the day
when you are freed of this lamentable weakness you will be unable to endure even the sight
of them. At present with their drachma and gallon measure and four obols1 they
regulate the populace like a sick man, giving you, men of Athens, doles very similar to the diets of the physicians. For these diets
neither put strength into the patient nor allow him to die, and these doles neither allow
you to cry quits and engage in some different and better business, nor can they alone
suffice.2
1 The drachma was the fee for attending the Assembly; the four obols is the juror's fee, which had long been three obols. The χοῦς is the measure for a largess of grain. Its content is more accurately known than formerly from a specimen found on the side of the Acropolis in 1937, which measures 3.2 liters or 2.816 imperial qts. or 3.379 U.S. qts. This find was confirmed by the discovery of a clepsydra in the Agora marked two χόες and measuring 6.4 liters. The χοῦς was one-twelfth of a medimnus, the portion doled out to each citizen according to Dem. 34.37. Cf. Hesperia, 8.1939, 278 ff.
Demosthenes with an English translation by Norman W. DeWitt, Ph.D., and Norman J. DeWitt, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1949.
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