Invective: was the ridicule of Aeschines a legitimate weapon or a slander?

Demosthenes, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The ridicule was a weapon and I used it as one. Aeschines was not a private man being mocked for sport; he was a public man who had taken Philip's side and Philip's money and had brought a suit to strip a crown voted by the people.1 In an Athenian court the character of the man making the accusation is part of the case, he used the same instrument against me, and the jury expected it of both of us.2345

Sources

  1. For then is the opportunity of a loyal and gallant citizen. But that when he has never to this day demanded my punishment, either in the name of the city or in his own, for any public--nor, I will add, for any private--crime, he should have come here with a trumped-up charge against the grant of a crown and a vote of thanks, and should have spent so many words upon it--that is a sign of personal enmity and jealousy…
    The Public Orations, Vol 2
  2. But no such words, no such sound, did he utter, nor did one 210 of you hear him do so; he only uttered threats to a different effect. And why?
    The Public Orations, Vol 1, pp. 217–218
  3. If the defendant Aeschines was not deliberately deceiving 102 you for a price, he must necessarily, I presume, have had one of two reasons for making the statements in question to you, in regard to the Phocians and Thespiae and Euboea.
    The Public Orations, Vol 1, pp. 184–185
  4. It was for this arraigned him before the assembly; this is the matter upon which you will give your verdict now. If 1, foregoing the. advantage of a private suit, give up my revenge to the state, and have chosen this kind of trial, from AGAINST MIDIAS. ὍΣ which I myself can reap no profit, surely it ought to procure | me fayour with you, not to do me a mischief.
    Against Leptines, Midias, Androtion and Aristocrates, pp. 75–76
  5. For those who hear are stimulated to do good service to the State, and commend those who return gratitude for such service even more than they commend the recipient of the crown. That is why the city has enacted this law. (To the clerk.) Take the law itself and read it. [The law is read.] {121} Do you hear, Aeschines, the plain words of the law?
    The Public Orations, Vol 2

Where the argument is made

  • On the Crown (330) sections 126-131 and 258-262 on Aeschines' parentage, upbringing and poverty
  • sections 51-52 and 139-159 on his alleged service to Philip
  • sections 180 and 209 on his years as a third-rate actor

How the argument was received

Contested by modern sensibility, which reads the attacks on his mother, his poverty and his trade as gratuitous cruelty, and by scholars who note the charges were exaggerated well past what the evidence carried.