For the truth of my assertion I will show you a strong argument derived from the laws themselves. For the golden crown itself which is proclaimed in the city theater the law takes from the man who is crowned, and commands that it be dedicated to Athena. And yet who among you would dare to charge the Athenian people with such illiberality? For certainly no state, nay, not even a private person—not one—would be so mean as to proclaim a crown and at the same moment demand back the gift which he himself had made. But I think it is because the crown is the gift of foreigners that the dedication is made, lest any one set a higher value upon the gratitude of a foreign state than upon that of his own country, and so become corrupted.
Aeschines. Aeschines with an English translation by Charles Darwin Adams, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1919.
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.