ON THE NAVAL BOARDS
§ 1. who praise your forefathers. The advocates of war with Persia had doubtless appealed to the memory of Marathon and Salamis, and the old position of Athens as the champion of Greece against Persia.
§ 10, 11. The argument is this: 'If a war with Persia needed a special kind of force, we could not prepare for it without being detected: but as all wars need the same kind of force, our preparations need rouse no suspicion in Persia particularly.'
acknowledged foes: i.e. probably Thebes, or the revolted allies of Athens, with whom a disadvantageous peace had, perhaps, just been made. It is not, however, impossible that Philip also is in the orator's mind; for though at the time he was probably engaged in war with the Illyrians and Paeonians, his quarrel with Athens in regard to Amphipolis had not been settled. The Olynthians may also be thought of. (See Introd. to Phil. I and Olynthiacs.)
§ 12. rhapsodies. The rhapsodes who went about Greece reciting Homer and other poets had lost the distinction they once enjoyed, and 'rhapsody' became a synonym for idle declamation.
§ 14. a bold speech: i.e. a demand for instant war, helped out by rhetorical praises of the men of old.
§ 16. unmarried heiresses and orphans. These would be incapable of discharging the duties of the trierarchy, though their estates were liable for the war-tax. Partners were probably exempted, when none of them possessed so large a share in the common property as would render him liable for trierarchy.
property outside Attica. According to the terms made by Athens with her allies when the 'Second Delian League' was formed in 378, Athens undertook that no Athenian should hold property in an allied State. But this condition had been broken, and the multiplication of Athenian estates [Greek: _kl_erhouchiai_] in allied territories had been one of the causes of the war with the allies.
unable to contribute: e. g. owing to no longer possessing the estate which he had when the assessment was made.
§ 17. to associate, &c. The sections which contained a very rich man were to have poor men included in it, so that the total wealth of every section might be the same, and the distribution of the burden between the sections fair.
§ 18. the first hundred, &c. Demosthenes thinks of the fleet as composed, according to need, of 100, 200, or 300 vessels, and treats each hundred as a separate squadron, to be separately divided among the Boards.
by lot. In this and other clauses of his proposal, Demosthenes stipulates for the use of the lot ([Greek: _sunkl_er_osai_], [Greek: epikl_erosai]) to avoid all unfair selection. It is only in the distribution of duties among the smaller sections within each Board that assignment by arrangement ([Greek: apodounai], a word suggesting distribution according to fitness or convenience) is to be allowed.
§ 19. taxable capital ([Greek: _tim_ema_]). The war-tax and the trierarchic burdens were assessed on a valuation of the contributor's property. Upon this valuation of his taxable capital he paid the percentage required. (The old view that he was taxed not upon his capital, as valued, but upon a fraction of it varying with his wealth, rests upon an interpretation of passages in the Speeches against Aphobus, which is open to grave question.) The total amount of the single valuations was the 'estimated taxable capital of the country' ([Greek: _tim_ema t_es ch_oras_]). This, in the case of the trierarchy, would be the aggregate amount of the valuations of the 1,200 wealthiest men, viz. 6,000 talents. (Of course the capital taxable for the war-tax would be considerably larger. Even at a time when the prosperity of Attica was much lower, in 378-377 B.C., it was nearly 6,000 talents, according to Polybius, ii. 62. 6.)
§ 20. A tabular statement will make this plain:—
_Persons _Total capital taxable Ships. responsible_. for each ship_.
100 12 60 tal. 200 6 30 " 300 4 20 "
The percentage payable on the taxable capital was of course higher, the larger the number of ships required. Each ship appears to have cost on the average a talent to equip. The percentages in the three cases contained in the table would therefore be 1-2/3, 3-1/3, and 5, respectively. (Compare § 27.)
§ 21. fittings … in arrear. Apparently former trierarchs had not always given back the fittings of their vessels, which had either been provided at the expense of the State, or lent to the trierarchs by the State.
§ 23. wards ([Greek: trittyes]). The trittys or ward was one-third of a tribe.
§ 25. you see … city. The Assembly met on the Pnyx, whence there was a view of the Acropolis and of the greater part of the ancient city.
prophets. The Athenian populace seems always to have been liable to the influence of soothsayers, who professed to utter oracles from the gods, particularly when war was threatening. This was so (e. g.) at the time of the Peloponnesian War (Thucyd. ii. 8, v. 26), and the soothsayer is delightfully caricatured by Aristophanes in the Birds and elsewhere.
§ 29. two hundred ships … one hundred were Athenian. In the Speech on the Crown, § 238, Demosthenes gives the numbers as 300 and 200. Perhaps a transcriber at an early stage in the history of the text accidentally wrote HH (the symbol for 200) instead of HHH, in the case of the first number, and a later scribe then 'corrected' the second number into H instead of HH. The numbers given by Herodotus are 378 and 180, and, for the Persian ships, 1,207.
§ 31. against Egypt, which was now in rebellion against Artaxerxes. Orontas, Satrap of Mysia, was more or less constantly in revolt during this period.
§ 32. even more certainly [Greek: palai]: lit. 'long ago'. The transition from temporal to logical priority is paralleled in certain uses of other temporal adverbs, e.g. [Greek: euthys] (Aristotle, Poet. v), and [Greek: _schol_e_] (of which, as Weil notes, [Greek: palai] is the exact opposite).
§ 34. sins against Hellas. This refers to the support given to the Persian invaders by Thebes in the Persian Wars (Herod. viii. 34).