I decline to buy repentance at the cost of ten thousand drachmas.

The line presents repentance as something that can be “purchased” only at an exorbitant price—ten thousand drachmas—so the speaker refuses to pay for a belated change of heart that would require a ruinous sacrifice. In Demosthenic rhetoric, such phrasing typically functions as a moral and political rebuke: it implies that regret after the fact is worthless if it comes only once the costs are unavoidable, and it warns against policies or concessions that would amount to paying heavily merely to acknowledge an earlier mistake. The force of the sentence lies in its economic concreteness, turning an ethical posture into a vivid calculation of loss.