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that I was startled by your clamor, Athenians, and let my cloak drop so that I was half-naked in my tunic, trying to get away from his grasp, and when you met me afterwards, Mind you prosecute the blackguard, you cried; don’t let him go; the Athenians will watch to see what you are going to do; and yet when the act has been condemned by vote as an outrage, and those who gave that verdict were sitting in a sacred building, and when I have stuck to my task and not betrayed either you or myself, if after all this you are going to acquit him.Editors find this sentence so intolerably clumsy that they see in it a proof that Demosthenes did not revise this part of the speech. It may be urged that the sentence, though involved, is lucid enough and would be very effective as an apparently unpremeditated outburst.
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Never! Such a result entails all that is most disgraceful. I do not deserve this at your hands, Athenians. How should I, when I am bringing to justice a fellow who is as violent a bully as he is reputed to be, who has offended against decency at a public festival, and who has made not only you, but all the Greeks who were visiting the city, witnesses of his brutality? The people heard what he had done. What was the result? They voted him guilty and passed him on to your court.