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[3]
I refer to Iphicrates,1 who said, “A general must so
choose to risk a battle, that not this or that may result but just this,” for
such were his exact words. The meaning of this was obvious, for he meant “that
he might come off victorious.” So, when you take the field, whoever is leader is
master of you, but now each one of yourselves is a general. Thus it is your duty to show
yourselves to have made such decisions as will inevitably be good for the State and that
you shall not, for the sake of mere hopes of future goods, bring about something not so
good as the prosperity you at present enjoy.
1 Iphicrates died in 353 B.C. when Demosthenes was about thirty years of age. The orator's admiration is revealed in Dem. 21.62-63 and Dem. 23.129-131.
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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