Timaeus tells us that Demochares had been guilty of such impurity that he was not a fit person to blow the sacrificial flame, and that in his practices he had been more shameless than the works of <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Botrys&groupId=407&placeId=756">Botrys</a>, Philaenis, and other obscene writers.
Scurrilous assertions of this kind are such as not only no man of culture, but not even any of the inmates of a brothel would make.
But Timaeus, in order that he may gain credit for his filthy accusations and his utter lack of decency, has made a further false charge against Demochares, dragging in the evidence of a comic poet of no repute.
You will ask on what grounds I infer that Timaeus is guilty of falsehood? FIRST and foremost because Demochares was of good birth and breeding, being the nephew of Demosthenes,
and secondly because the Athenians deemed him worthy not only of the office of strategus, but of other distinctions, to none of which could he have successfully aspired had he had such disadvantages to combat.
Timaeus, therefore, seems to me to accuse not so much Demochares as the Athenians for advancing such a man and entrusting their country and their lives and properties to him.
But not a word of all this can be true. For in that case not only Archedicus, the comic poet, would, as Timaeus asserts, have said this about Demochares,
but many of the friends of Antipater also, against whom Demochares had ventured to say much calculated to vex not only Antipater himself but his successors and former friends. The same accusations would have been brought also by many of Demochares' political adversaries, among whom was Demetrius of Phaleron.
Demochares in his history brings accusations by no means trivial against Demetrius, telling us that the statesmanship on which he prided himself was such as a vulgar farmer of taxes would pride himself on, his boast having been that the market in the town was plentifully supplied and cheap, and that there was abundance of all the necessities of life for everybody.
He tells us that a snail moved by machinery went in front of his procession, spitting out saliva, and that donkeys were marched through the theatre, to show, forsooth, that the country had yielded up to others all the glory of Greece and obeyed the behests of Cassander. Of all this he says he was in no wise ashamed.
But yet neither Demetrius nor anyone else said anything of the sort about Demochares.
Walbank Commentary