previous next
[26] And to the creditors who lent money for the outward voyage you had difficulty in paying the principal, though they sailed with you and kept pressing you for payment; yet to this man who was not present, you not only returned both principal and interest, but also paid the penalties arising from the agreement1 though you were under no necessity of doing so?

1 We learn from Dem. 34.33 that the contract entailed a penalty of five thousand drachmae in case a return cargo was not shipped, but of course payment could not have been exacted in Bosporus. The speaker seems to identify the overpayment of one thousand three hundred and twenty drachmae with this penalty; but the “overpayment” represents almost exactly the amount of the money Lampis had loaned to Phormio, plus the thirty percent interest. It is, of course, possible that the penalty of five thousand drachmae was to be paid if Phormio neither shipped the goods nor paid Lampis, and the lesser sum if payment was made to Lampis without the shipment of a return cargo.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Notes (F. A. Paley)
load focus Greek (1921)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Bosporus (Turkey) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (4 total)
  • Commentary references to this page (1):
    • F. A. Paley, Select Private Orations of Demosthenes, 28
  • Cross-references in notes from this page (1):
    • Demosthenes, Against Phormio, 33
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (2):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: