[15]
Furthermore, men of the jury, the first witness to give this testimony was
Aesius, the brother of the plaintiff. He now denies it, because he has allied
himself in the suit with Aphobus; but at that time he gave this testimony along
with the other witnesses, for he had no desire to perjure himself, or to suffer
the penalty which would straightway follow. Surely now, if I had been getting up
false testimony, I should not have put this man in my list of witnesses, seeing
that he was more intimate with Aphobus than with anyone else in the world, and
knowing that he was going to plead for him in the suit, and that he was an
adversary of my own. It is not reasonable that one should call as witness to a
false statement one who is an opponent of his own, and a brother of his
adversary.
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.