Some of you will, perhaps, ask in amazement:  Is a man to be indicted for his temperament?  He is.  And why?  In order that every one of us fearing the penalties of the law more than the enemy may be the better champion of his country.  Accordingly, the lawgiver excludes alike the man who declines service, the coward, and the deserter of his post, from the lustral limits in the market place, and suffers no such person to receive a wreath of honor or to enter places of public worship.  But you, Ktesiphon, exhort us to set a crown on the head to which the laws refuse it.  You by your private edict call a forbidden guest into the forefront of our solemn festival, and invite into the temple of Dionysos that dastard by whom all temples have been betrayed. ...  Remember then, Athenians, that the city whose fate rests with you is no alien city, but your own.  Give the prizes of ambition by merit, not by chance.  Reserve your rewards for those whose manhood is truer, whose characters are worthier.  Look at each other and judge not only with your ears but with your eyes who of your number are likely to support Demosthenes.  His young companions in the chase or the gymnasium?  No, by the Olympian Zeus!  He has not spent his life in hunting or in any healthful exercise, but in cultivating rhetoric to be used against men of property.  Think of his boastfulness when he claims by his embassy to have snatched Byzantium out of the hands of Philip, to have thrown the Acharnians into revolt, to have astonished the Thebans with his harangue!  He thinks that you have reached the point of fatuity at which you can be made to believe even this—­as if your citizen were the deity of persuasion instead of a pettifogging mortal!  And when at the end of his speech, he calls as his advocates those who shared his bribes, imagine that you see upon this platform where I now speak before you, an array drawn up to confront their profligacy—­the benefactors of Athens:  Solon, who set in order the Democracy by his glorious laws, the philosopher, the good legislator, entreating you with the gravity which so well became him never to set the rhetoric of Demosthenes above your oaths and above the laws; Aristides, who assessed the tribute of the Confederacy, and whose daughters after his death were dowered by the State—­indignant at the contumely threatened to justice and asking:  Are you not ashamed?  When Arthmios of Zeleia brought Persian gold to Greece and visited Athens, our fathers well-nigh put him to death, though he was our public guest, and proclaimed him expelled from Athens and from all territory that the Athenians rule; while Demosthenes, who has not brought us Persian gold but has taken bribes for himself and has kept them to this day, is about to receive a golden wreath from you!  And Themistokles, and they who died at Marathon and Plataea, aye, and the very graves of our forefathers—­do you not think they will utter a voice of lamentation, if he who covenants with barbarians to work against Greece shall be—­crowned!