delighted in describing it with the most violent exaggeration. The injured farmer's wife, on this occasion, pointed with tears to four bushels of barley which had got wet and were being dried, and to a jar of oil, which had indeed fallen down, but which was not damaged. For this they wanted to claim, according to the defendant, 1000 drachms, or about £40, by way of compensation. An Attic farmer, it would seem (like his English representative), was not likely to suffer from asking too little. There is something very characteristic in the following remark, which Demosthenes' client makes about his opponent: "In going to law with me," he says, "I hold the plaintiff to be thoroughly wicked and infatuated."
In another[1] somewhat interesting case, Demosthenes pleads for an unfortunate man who had been ejected from his township, and was thereby in danger of ceasing to be an Athenian citizen. At Athens, citizenship was the subject of the strictest scrutiny; and the registers of the townships were kept with the utmost care. Every citizen, as has been already noted, had to be twice registered; and to insure accuracy, and to exclude questionable persons, the lists were from time to time revised. Even with all these precautions, cases of disputed citizenship not unfrequently occurred. In the case which we are about to consider, Demosthenes' client had been struck off the register of his township on the occasion of a revision. The man's father had been taken prisoner during the latter part of the Peloponnesian War; and having lived some years in for-
- ↑ Speech against Eubulides.
