Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
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How these people came to form their conspiracy against me I will tell you, if you wish to hear it, as soon as I shall have spoken about my parentage.
57.17In the meantime what do I hold to be just, and what am I prepared to do, men of the jury? To show you that I am an Athenian on both my father's and my mother's side, and to produce to prove it witnesses whose veracity you will not question, and to break down the calumnies and the charges brought against me. It will rest with you, when you have heard my statements, if you conclude that I am a citizen and the victim of a conspiracy, to come to my rescue; but if you reach a different conclusion, to act in whatever way your regard for your oaths may bid you. I will begin with this proof.57.18They 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 war note and was sold into slavery and taken to
In the first place, to prove that my father was taken prisoner and was ransomed, I will bring witnesses before you; then, that when he reached home he received from his uncles his share of the property; and furthermore, that neither among the members of the deme nor among those of the clan nor anywhere else did anyone ever accuse him (despite his foreign accent) with being a foreigner.
Please take the depositions.Depositions
57.20You have heard, then, of my father's being taken prisoner by the enemy and of the good fortune which brought him back here. To prove now that he was your fellow-citizen, men of the jury (for this you may depend upon as being the veritable truth), I will call as witnesses those of my relatives on my father's side who are still living.
Call first, please, Thucritides and Charisiades; for their father Charisius was brother to my grandfather Thucritides and my grandmother Lysaretê, and uncle to my father (for my father had married his sister born of a different mother). note
57.21Next, call Niciades; for his father Lysanias was brother to Thucritides and Lysaretê, and uncle to my father. After him, call Nicostratus; for his father Niciades was nephew to my grandfather and my grandmother, and cousin to my father.Call all these persons, please. And do you check the water.Witnesses
57.22You have heard, men of
Now take also the depositions of those related to my father on the female side.Depositions
57.23These persons, then, the surviving relatives of my father, on both the male and the female side, have testified that he was on both sides an Athenian and justly entitled to the rights of citizenship.
Now call, please, the clansmen and thereafter the members of the gens. noteWitnesses
Now take the depositions of the demesmen and the members of the gens in regard to the clansmen, to show that they elected me president of the clan.Depositions
57.24You have heard, then, the testimony given by my relatives and fellow-clansmen and by the members of the deme and of the gens, who are the proper persons to be called upon to testify. And from this you may learn whether a man who has this support is a citizen or an alien. If we were seeking protection in the testimony of one or two people only, we might be open to the suspicion that we had suborned them; but if it appears that my father in his lifetime and I myself at present have been put to the test before all the groups to which each one of you belongs (I mean those of clan, of kindred, of the deme, and of the gens), how can it be, how can it possibly be, that all these persons have been suborned to appear, they not being in truth relatives of mine?
Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
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