[94]
I presume that our reply to the Hellenic world will
be: “We have a law here,—the statute of Timocrates. Kindly
wait till the ninth presidency; then after that we will start.” No
other excuse is left. And if you have to fight in self-defence, do you really
think that the enemy will wait for the evasions and rogueries of every scoundrel
in Athens? If our city enacts laws
for her own discomfiture, laws exactly contrary to her own interests, do you
think she will ever be able to play her true part in the world?
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.