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and once you have passed a decree, adopt as your leaders Zeus of Dodona and the rest of the gods, who have uttered in your interest many splendid, encouraging and true oracles, and summon them to your aid and after you have prayed to all of them for success with a vow of the fruits of victory,Cf. Plut. Marius 26 εὔξατο τοῖς θεοῖς κατὰ ἑκατόμβης, He prayed to the gods for victory, taking a vow to sacrifice a hecatomb. with good fortune attending you, proceed to liberate the Greeks. Farewell.
Concerning His Own Restoration
1
Three citations of this letter may be found in Walz’s Rhetores Graeci, which will be mentioned in the footnotes. Harpocration refers to sect. 20 under the name Calauria. Demosthenes to the Council and the Assembly sends greeting
1
I used to believe, because of my conduct in public life, that, as one who was guilty of no wrong toward you, I should not only never meet with such treatment as thisThe opening sentence down to this point is cited by Hermog. Rhet. Graec. 3, p. 349. but, even if I should have committed some slight offence, that I might meet with forgiveness. Since, however, it has turned out as it has, so long as I observed you, without any manifest proof or even a scrutiny of evidence on the part of the Council,In Plut. Dem. 26, Plutarch informs us that the trial took place before the Areopagus. This was in the spring of 324 B.C. The exile lasted a year. condemning all the accused on the strength of the unrevealed information of that body, I chose to make the best of it, thinking that you were surrendering rights no less valuable than those of which I was being deprived. Because, for the jurors under oath to assent to whatever the Council should declare, without any proof having been cited, that was a surrender of a constitutional right.
