[216]
that I was startled by your clamor,
Athenians, and let my cloak drop so that I was half-naked in my tunic, trying to
get away from his grasp, and when you met me afterwards, “Mind you
prosecute the blackguard,” you cried; “don't let him go; the
Athenians will watch to see what you are going to do”; and yet when
the act has been condemned by vote as an outrage, and those who gave that
verdict were sitting in a sacred building, and when I have stuck to my task and
not betrayed either you or myself, if after all this you are going to acquit
him.1
1 Editors find this sentence so intolerably clumsy that they see in it a proof that Demosthenes did not revise this part of the speech. It may be urged that the sentence, though involved, is lucid enough and would be very effective as an apparently unpremeditated outburst.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
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