With gross outrage I have met, men of the jury, at the
hands of the defendant, Conon, and have
suffered such bodily injury that for a very long time neither my relatives nor
any of the attending physicians thought that I should survive. Contrary to
expectation, however, I did recover and regain my strength, and I then brought
against him this action for the assault. All my friends and relatives, whose
advice I asked, declared that for what he had done the defendant was liable to
summary seizure as a highwayman, or to public indictments for criminal
outrage1; but they urged and advised me not to
take upon myself matters which I should not be able to carry, or to appear to be
bringing suit for the maltreatment I had received in a manner too ambitious for
one so young. I took this course, therefore, and, in deference to their advice,
have instituted a private suit, although I should have been very glad, men of
Athens, to prosecute the
defendant on a capital charge.
1 As guilty of highway robbery the defendant had made himself liable to summary arrest （ἀπαγωγή）, and the gravity of his assault would have justified a public indictment for criminal outrage （ὕβρεως γραφή）, for either of which crimes he would, if convicted, have suffered a heavy penalty. The private suit for assault and battery （αἰκείας δίκη） entailed merely a fine to be paid to the plaintiff.
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.
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.