[32]
—as though you
would believe them off-hand, and would have no regard to the truth of the matter
that, to begin with, Lysistratus and Paseas and Niceratus and Diodorus, who have
expressly testified that they saw me being beaten by Conon, stripped of my cloak, and suffering all
the other forms of brutal outrage I experienced—men, remember, who
were unacquainted with me and who happened on the affair by
chance—that these men, I say, would never in the world have consented
to give testimony which they would have known to be false, if they had not seen
the maltreatment which I received; and, secondly, that I myself, if I had not
been thus treated by the defendant, should never have let off men who are
admitted by my opponents themselves to have struck me, and have chosen to
proceed first against the one who never laid a finger on me.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by Norman W. DeWitt, Ph.D., and Norman J. DeWitt, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1949.
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