The matters that
you are debating, men of Athens, are
to my mind so important and even vital to the State, that I will endeavour to
offer you what I consider profitable advice on the subject. While the faults
that have produced this unhappy state of things are neither few nor recently
accumulated, there is nothing, men of Athens, more vexing at the present time than the way in which
you detach your thoughts from affairs, and display an interest only so long as
you sit here listening, or when some fresh item of news arrives; after that,
each man goes home, and not only pays no attention to public business, but does
not even recall it to mind.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by J. H. Vince, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1930.
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.