[53]
In which
statement, then, is one to believe them? It surely would have been their right,
if I had been illegitimate or an alien, to inherit all my property. Do they
prefer, then, to take a little and jeopardize themselves by giving false
testimony and to commit perjury, rather than to take everything, and that with
safety, without having invoked a curse upon their own heads? This is not the
case. No; in my opinion, seeing that they are my relatives, they are but doing
what is right in aiding one of themselves.
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.