Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
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7.1Men of
7.2Philip begins by saying that he offers you Halonnesus as his own property, but that you have no right to demand it of him, because it was not yours when he took it, and is not yours now that he holds it. Moreover, when we ambassadors visited him, he used similar language, to the effect that he had captured the island from pirates and that therefore it belonged absolutely to him. 7.3It is not difficult to refute this claim on the ground of its unfairness. For all pirates seize places belonging to others and turn them into strongholds from which to harry their neighbors. But a man who should defeat and punish pirates would surely be unreasonable, if he said that the stolen property wrongfully held by them passed thereby into his own possession. 7.4For, that plea once granted, if some pirates seize a strip of Attic territory, or a part of
7.7But when he says that he is willing to arbitrate, he is merely mocking you. In the first place, he expects Athenians to refer to arbitration, as against this upstart from
7.9Then again he says that he has sent envoys to arrange with you an inter-state legal compact, and that this compact will be valid, not as soon as it is ratified by the body of Athenian jurors, as the law directs, but only after it has been referred to him, thus constituting himself a court of appeal from your decision. note His object, of course, is to steal a march on you, and to insert in the compact an admission on your part that none of the wrongs committed at
Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
<<Dem. 6.31 | Dem. 7.5 (Greek) | >>Dem. 7.17 |