[33]
If,
therefore, even at the eleventh hour, you can shake off these habits, and
consent to fight and act as becomes Athenians and to devote the abundant
resources that you have at home to the attainment of success abroad, perhaps,
men of Athens, perhaps you may gain
some important and unqualified advantage and may be quit of these paltry
perquisites. Like the diet prescribed by doctors, which neither restores the
strength of the patient nor allows him to succumb, so these doles that you are
now distributing neither suffice to ensure your safety nor allow you to renounce
them and try something else; they only confirm each citizen in his apathy.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by J. H. Vince, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1930.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.