[68]
If you had confessed, men of Athens, that you are a nation of slaves and not of men who
claim empire over others, you would never have put up with the insults which he
repeatedly offered you in the marketplace, binding and arresting aliens and
citizens alike, bawling from the platform in the Assembly, calling men slaves
and slave-born who were better men than himself and of better birth, and asking
if the jail was built for no object. I should certainly say it was, if your
father danced his way out of it, fetters and all, at the procession of the
Dionysia. All his other outrages it would be impossible to relate; they are too
numerous. For all of them taken together you must exact vengeance today, and
make an example of him to teach the rest to behave with more restraint.
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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