[7]
And yet it
does not escape me that it is difficult to describe your character in keeping
with your deserts and that it is more hazardous still to give advice when the
adviser is bound to make himself answerable for his advice to the one who
accepts it.1 It is my
judgement, however, that, while it becomes the recipients of merited eulogies to
baffle by the excess of their real virtue the ability of those who praise them,
yet in my counsel I shall not miss the mark, being well aware that no advice
could be innocently carried out if proffered by men who are senseless and quite
ruined by incontinence, not even if they advise supremely well, but that not
even the advice that is only moderately pondered can altogether miss the mark if
tendered by men who choose to live pure and self disciplined lives.
1 Blass notes a parallel in Dem. 18.189, but it is remote.
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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