but what length of time could conceal your acts of plunder in the case of the triremes and the trierarchs? For when you had carried constitutional amendments as to the Three Hundred,1 and had persuaded the Athenians to make you Commissioner of the Navy, you were convicted by me of having stolen away trierarchs from sixty-five swift ships,2 making away with a greater naval force of the city than that with which the Athenians once defeated Pollis and the Lacedaemonians at Naxos.3
1 The wealthy leaders of the property-groups on which the burden of the trierarchy was laid.
2 In 340 B.C. Demosthenes carried a reform of the naval system, by which he compelled the richest citizens to contribute to the support of the navy strictly in proportion to their wealth. Under his system the number of individuals contributing （the trierarchs） may well have been diminished, but the number of the triremes was not lessened, their efficiency was increased, and taxation was made equitable. The matter is fully discussed in Dem. 19.102-109.
3 In the battle of Naxos, 376 B.C., Chabrias with an Athenian fleet of 83 triremes defeated Pollis, who with a Lacedaemonian fleet of 65 ships was trying to cut off the Athenian grain ships.
Aeschines. Aeschines with an English translation by Charles Darwin Adams, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1919.
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