previous next
[17] It is not so, but it is to win these prizes that he devotes his activities to all those other objects.

Therefore each must know and feel in his own mind the truth of this, but you must not, of course, call for a declaration of war from the statesman who is trying, in all honesty, to give you the best advice; for that would be the act of men who want to find someone to fight with, not of men who seek the interests of their state.1

1 To propose war on Philip would be dangerous to the speaker, as explained in the speech Dem. 8.68, and unnecessary, as Philip is already at war with Athens.

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

Creative Commons License
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.

load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Athens (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in notes from this page (1):
    • Demosthenes, On the Chersonese, 68
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: