[49]
Yet the law distinctly provides that beyond the
frontier a man shall not be pursued, whereas you permit him to be seized
anywhere. Beyond the frontier the law forbids not only pursuit but also seizure;
and yet according to your decree anyone who chooses will take as an outcast and
forcibly seize a man who has slain without intention, and carry him by violence
into the country of the slain man. Are you not treating human conduct
indiscriminately, and ignoring the motives according to which a given act is
either virtuous or immoral?—
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
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.