Antidosis

I said, I think, before these selections were read, that I asked not only to be adjudged guilty if my discourses are harmful but to be visited with the heaviest of punishments if they are not incomparable.[*](See Isoc. 15.51.) If any of you then felt that my words were boastful and over-confident, they cannot longer justly be of this opinion; for I think that I have made good my promise and that the discourses which have been read to you are such as from the first I maintained that they were.

But I want to say just a word in behalf of each of them and so make it still more manifest that what I then said and what I now say about them is true. First of all, tell me what eloquence could be more righteous or more just than one which praises our ancestors in a manner worthy of their excellence and of their achievements?