[59]
And furthermore, out of all your number,
men of the jury, out of all the host of the rest of the Athenians, not a single
other person has testified that he was present at this sale; Timocrates alone,
like a god from the machine,1 testified that my father gave a feast to Boeotus
on the tenth day （and Timocrates is of the same age as the present
defendant!）. Timocrates declares that he has perfect knowledge of all
that is for the advantage of these men; and now on his own sole authority he
testifies that he was present with Crito when he bought the house from me. Who
among you will believe this? Not one, of course; especially since I am not now
suing about the house to determine whether Crito bought it or not, but about the
marriage-portion which, seeing that my mother brought it with her, the laws
declare that I should recover.
1 The deus ex machina of the tragic stage.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
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.