Exordia

Your enthusiasm, I allow, is worthy of all praise and such as a man of goodwill toward the State might pray for; but the more intense your enthusiasm the more foresighted you should now be to employ it as you ought. For you know that no choice of a course of action justifies itself unless the end it achieves be beneficial and honorable. I am sure I once heard here in your presence, men of Athens, a man who was thought to be lacking neither in sense nor in experience of war.

I refer to Iphicrates,[*](Iphicrates died in 353 B.C. when Demosthenes was about thirty years of age. The orator’s admiration is revealed in Dem. 21.62-63 and Dem. 23.129-131.) who said, A general must so choose to risk a battle, that not this or that may result but just this, for such were his exact words. The meaning of this was obvious, for he meant that he might come off victorious. So, when you take the field, whoever is leader is master of you, but now each one of yourselves is a general. Thus it is your duty to show yourselves to have made such decisions as will inevitably be good for the State and that you shall not, for the sake of mere hopes of future goods, bring about something not so good as the prosperity you at present enjoy.

I should have thought, men of Athens, that no one who has a clean conscience about the measures taken would prefer a complaint against those who move to bring these matters to an accounting; for the more often one examines into them, the more the authors of them are bound to grow in esteem. These men themselves, however, seem to me to render it manifest that they have not acted with the State’s interests in view. At any rate, just as if they were bound to be found guilty if they should come again to an accounting, they assume the defensive and say we are acting outrageously. And yet when you accuse of outrageous conduct those who wish to investigate, what are we citizens to say of those who in that very transaction have perpetrated a fraud against our own selves?