[18]
They
have maliciously asserted that my father spoke with a foreign accent. But that
he was taken prisoner by the enemy in the course of the Decelean war1 and was sold into slavery and taken
to Leucas, and that he there fell in
with Cleander,2 the actor, and was
brought back here to his kinsfolk after a long lapse of time—all this
they have omitted to state; but just as though it were right that I should be
brought to ruin on account of his misfortunes, they have made his foreign accent
the basis of a charge against him.
1 The latter period of the Peloponnesian war, 413-404 B.C., is often called the Decelean war, because the Lacedaemonians, who had again invaded Attica, occupied the town of Decelea, not far from Athens, and maintained a garrison there.
2 The modern Leukas, or Santa Maura, off the west coast of Acarnania.
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. #CommissionEarned
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.
