[105]
Now I have been quite seriously informed that with
regard to the absolute prohibition of all rewards,1 whatever a man's services may be, our opponents are prepared to
use some such argument as this. The Lacedaemonians, who are a well-organized
state, and the Thebans grant no such reward to any of their citizens, and yet
possibly there are some good men among them. In my opinion, men of Athens, all such arguments are provocative,
and intended to persuade you to abolish the immunities, but just they are
certainly not. For I am quite aware that the Thebans and the Lacedaemonians and
ourselves do not observe the same laws and customs, nor the same form of
government.
1 Demosthenes here misrepresents the law, which only touched the immunities. "Quite seriously" is taken by some with "prepared to use."
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by C. A. Vince, M. A. and J. H. Vince, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1926.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
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.