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1 Demosthenes to the
Council and the Assembly sends greeting
I used to believe, because of my conduct in public life, that, as one who was guilty of
no wrong toward you, I should not only never meet with such treatment as this2 but, even if I should have
committed some slight offence, that I might meet with forgiveness. Since, however, it has
turned out as it has, so long as I observed you, without any manifest proof or even a
scrutiny of evidence on the part of the Council,3 condemning all the accused on the strength of the
unrevealed information of that body, I chose to make the best of it, thinking that you
were surrendering rights no less valuable than those of which I was being deprived.
Because, for the jurors under oath to assent to whatever the Council should declare,
without any proof having been cited, that was a surrender of a constitutional right.
1 Three citations of this letter may be found in Walz's Rhetores Graeci, which will be mentioned in the footnotes. Harpocration refers to sect. 20 under the name Calauria.
2 The opening sentence down to this point is cited by Hermog. Rhet. Graec. 3, p. 349.
3 In Plut. Dem. 26, Plutarch informs us that the trial took place before the Areopagus. This was in the spring of 324 B.C. The exile lasted a year.
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.
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