[The decree is read.]
{268} This decree, gentlemen of the jury, is one which in the eyes of all, Hellenes and foreigners alike, it was right and honourable in you to have passed in condemnation of traitors and men detested of Heaven. And so, since the taking of the bribe is the step which precedes such actions, and it is the bribe that prompts the traitor's deeds, whenever, men of Athens, you find a man receiving a bribe, you must count him a traitor as well. That one man betrays opportunities, and another affairs of state, and another soldiers, means only, I imagine, that each works mischief in the particular department over which he has control; but there should be no distinction in your execration of all such men. {269} You, men of Athens, are the only people in the world who can draw from your own history examples which bear upon this matter, and who have those ancestors, whom you rightly praise, to imitate in your actions. You may not be able, at the present time, to imitate them in the battles, the campaigns, the perils in which they distinguished themselves, since at the present moment you are at peace; but at least you can imitate their wisdom. {270} For of wisdom there is need everywhere; and a right judgement is no more laborious or troublesome a thing than a wrong one. Each of you need sit here no longer, in order to judge and vote on the question before him aright, and so to make his country's position a better one, and worthy of our ancestors, than he must in order to judge and vote wrongly, and so make it worse and unworthy of our ancestors. What then were their sentiments on this matter? (To the clerk.) Take this, clerk, and read it: (to the jury) for I would have you see that the acts towards which you are so indifferent are acts for which your forefathers voted death to the doers. (To the clerk.) Read.
[An inscription is read.]
{271} You hear the inscription, men of Athens, declaring that Arthmius[n] of Zeleia, son of Pythonax, is a foe and a public enemy to the people of Athens and their allies—both he and all his house. And why? Because he brought the gold from the foreigner to the Hellenes. Apparently, therefore, we may judge from this, that your ancestors sought to ensure that no one, not even a stranger, should work mischief against Hellas for money; whereas you do not even seek to prevent any of your fellow citizens from injuring his own city. {272} 'But,' it may be said, 'the inscription occupies a quite unimportant position.' On the contrary, although all yonder Acropolis is sacred and there is no lack of space upon it, this inscription stands on the right hand of the great bronze statue of Athena, the prize of valour in the war against the barbarians, set up by the State with funds which the Hellenes had presented to her. In those days, therefore, uprightness was so sacred, and such merit was attached to the punishment of actions like these, that the sentences passed upon such crimes were thought to deserve the same position as the prize-statue of the goddess. And now, unless you, in your turn, set a check upon this excess of licence, the result must be ridicule, impunity, and shame.[5] {273} You would do well, I think, men of Athens, to imitate your forefathers, not in this or that point alone, but continuously, and in all that they did. Now I am sure that you have all heard the story of Callias,[n] the son of Hipponicus, to whose diplomacy was due the Peace which is universally celebrated, and which provided that the king should not come down by land within a day's ride of the sea, nor sail with a ship of war between the Chelidonian islands and the Cyanean rocks. He was thought to have taken bribes on his mission; and your forefathers almost put him to death, and actually fined him, at the examination of his report, a sum of 50 talents. {274} True it is, that no more honourable peace can be mentioned than this, of all which the city ever made before or afterwards. But it was not to this that they looked. The nature of the Peace they attributed to their own prowess and the glory of their city: but whether the transaction was disinterested or corrupt, depended upon the character of the ambassador; and they expected the character displayed by one who took part in public affairs to be upright and incorruptible. {275} Your ancestors, then, regarded corruption as so inimical, so unprofitable, to the state, that they would not admit it in connexion with any single transaction or any single man; while you, men of Athens, though you have seen that the Peace which has laid low the walls of your own allies is building the houses of your ambassadors—that the Peace which has robbed the city of her possessions has secured for them more than they had ever before hoped for even in their dreams—you, I say, instead of putting them to death of your own accord, need a prosecutor to assist you; and when all can see their crimes in very deed, you are making their trial a trial of words.
{276} It is not, however, by the citation of ancient history, nor by these examples alone, that one may stimulate you to vengeance: for even within the lifetime of yourselves, who are here and still living, many have paid the penalty. All the rest of these I will pass over; but I will mention one or two of those who were punished with death, on returning from a mission whose results have been far less disastrous to the city than those of the present Embassy. (To the clerk.) Take then this decree and read it.
[The decree is read.]
{277} In this decree, men of Athens, you passed sentence of death upon those ambassadors, one of whom was Epicrates,[n] a good man, as I am told by my elders, and one who had in many ways been of service to his country—one of those who brought the people back from the Peiraeus,[n] and who was generally an upholder of the democracy. Yet none of these services helped him, and rightly. For one who claims to manage affairs of such magnitude has not merely to be half honest; he must not secure your confidence and then take advantage of it to increase his power to do mischief; he must do absolutely no wrong against you of his own will. {278} Now if there is one of the things for which those men were sentenced to death, that these men have not done, you may put me to death without delay. Observe what the charges were. 'Since they conducted their mission,' says the decree,[n] 'contrary to the terms of the resolution'—that is the first of the charges. And have not these men contravened the terms of the resolution? Does not the decree speak of peace 'for the Athenians and the allies of the Athenians?' and did they not exclude the Phocians from the treaty? Does not the decree bid them administer the oath to the magistrates in the several cities? and did they not administer it to men sent to them by Philip? Does not the resolution forbid them 'to meet Philip anywhere alone?' and did they not incessantly do business with him privately? {279} Again I read, 'And some of them have been convicted of making a false report before the Council.' But these men have been convicted of doing so before the People as well. And convicted by whom? for this is the splendid thing.[n] Convicted by the actual facts; for all that has happened, as you know, has been the exact reverse of what they announced. 'And,' the decree goes on, 'of not sending true dispatches.' Nor did these men. 'And of accusing our allies falsely and taking bribes.' Instead of 'accusing falsely', say, 'of having utterly ruined'—surely a far more heinous thing than a false accusation. And as for the charge of taking bribes, if it had been denied, it would still have required proof; but since they admitted it, a summary procedure was surely the proper one. {280} What then will you do, men of Athens? You are the offspring of that generation, and some of you are actually survivors from it; and will you endure it, that Epicrates, the benefactor of the people, one of the men from the Peiraeus, should have been exiled and punished;[n] that Thrasybulus, again, the son of the great Thrasybulus, the People's friend, who brought the people back from Phyle, should recently have been fined ten talents; and that the descendant of Harmodius,[n] and of those who achieved for you the greatest of blessings, and whom, for the benefits which they conferred upon you, you have caused to share in the libations and the bowls outpoured, in every temple where sacrifice is offered, singing of them and honouring them as you honour heroes and gods—{281} that all these, I say, should have undergone the penalty ordained by the laws, and that no feeling of compassion or pity, nor the tears of their children who bore the names of our benefactors, nor aught else, should have availed them anything: and yet, when you have to do with the son of Atrometus the schoolmaster, and Glaucothea, who used to hold those meetings of the initiated, a practice for which another priestess[n] was put to death—when you have in your hands the son of such parents, a man who never did a single service to his country—neither himself, nor his father, nor any of his house—will you let him go? {282} Where is the horse, the trireme, the military service, the chorus, the burden undertaken[n] for the state, the war-contribution, the loyal action, the peril undergone, for which in all their lifetime the city has had to thank him or his? Aye, and even if all these stood to his credit, and those other qualifications, of uprightness and integrity in his mission, were not also to be found in him, it would surely have been right that he should perish. But when neither the one nor the other are to be found, will you not avenge yourselves upon him? {283} Will you not call to mind his own words, when he was prosecuting Timarchus—that there was no help for a city which had no sinews to use against the criminal, nor for a constitution in which compassion and solicitation were more powerful than the laws—that it was your duty not to pity the aged mother of Timarchus, nor his children, nor any one else, but to attend solely to one point, namely, that if you abandoned the cause of the laws and the constitution, you would look in vain for any to have pity on yourselves. {284} Is that unhappy man to have lost his rights as a citizen, because he witnessed the guilt of Aeschines, and will you then suffer Aeschines to escape unscathed? On what ground can you do so? for if Aeschines demanded so heavy a penalty from those whose sins were against their own persons, what must be the magnitude of the penalty which you should require—you, the sworn judges of the case—from those who have sinned so greatly against their country's interests, and of whom Aeschines is convincingly proved to be one? {285} 'But,' we are told, 'that was a trial which will raise the moral standard of our young men.' Yes, and this trial will raise that of our statesmen, upon whose character the supreme interests of the city are staked. For your care ought to extend to them also. But you must realize that his real motive for ruining Timarchus himself was not, Heaven knows, to be found in any anxiety for the virtue of your sons. Indeed, men of Athens, they are virtuous even now; for I trust that the city will never have fallen so low, as to need Aphobetus and Aeschines to reform the morals of the young. {286} No! the reason was that Timarchus had proposed in the Council, that if any one was convicted of conveying arms or fittings for ships of war to Philip, the penalty should be death. And here is a proof. How long had Timarchus been in the habit of addressing you? For a long time. Now throughout all this time Aeschines was in Athens, and never showed any vexation or indignation at the fact of such a man addressing you, until he had been to Macedonia and made himself a hireling. (To the clerk.) Come, take the actual decree which Timarchus proposed, and read it.
[The decree is read.]
{287} So the man who proposed on your behalf the resolution which forbade, on pain of death, the supply of arms to Philip during the war, has been ruined and treated with contumely; while Aeschines, who had surrendered the arms of your very allies to Philip, was his accuser, and charged him—I call Heaven and Earth to witness—with unnatural offences, although two of his own kinsmen stood by his side, the very sight of whom would call forth a cry of protest from you—the disgusting Nicias, who went to Egypt and hired himself to Chabrias, and the accursed Cyrebion,[n] who joins in processions, as a reveller,[n] without a mask. Nay, why mention these things? His own brother Aphobetus was there before his eyes! In very truth all the words that were spoken on that day about unnatural offences were water flowing up stream.[n]
{288} And now, to show you the dishonour into which the villainy and mendacity of the defendant have brought our country, passing by all besides, I will mention a fact known to you all. Formerly, men of Athens, all the other Hellenes used to watch attentively, to see what had been resolved in your Assembly; but now we are already going about and inquiring what others have decided—trying to overhear what the Arcadians are doing, or the Amphictyons, or where Philip will be next, and whether he is alive or dead. {289} We do this, do we not? But for me the terrible question is not whether Philip is alive, but whether in this city the habit of execrating and punishing criminals is dead. Philip has no terrors for me, if your own spirit is sound; but the prospect that you may grant security to those who wish to receive their wages from him—that they may be supported by some of those whom you have trusted, and that those who have all along denied that they were acting in Philip's interests may now mount the platform in their defence—that is the prospect which terrifies me. {290} Tell me, Eubulus, why it was, that at the recent trial of your cousin Hegesilaus,[n] and of Thrasybulus, the uncle of Niceratus, when the primary question[n] was before the jury, you would not even respond when they called upon you; and that when you rose to speak on the assessment of the penalty,[n] you uttered not a word in their defence, but only asked the jury to be indulgent to you? Do you refuse to ascend the platform in defence of kinsmen and relations, {291} and will you then do so in defence of Aeschines, who, when Aristophon was prosecuting Philonicus, and in accusing him was denouncing your own acts, joined with him in accusing you, and was found in the ranks of your enemies? You frightened your countrymen here by saying that they must either march down to the Peiraeus at once, and pay the war-tax, and convert the festival-fund into a war-fund, or else pass the decree advocated by Aeschines and proposed by the shameless Philocrates—{292} a decree, of which the result was that the Peace became a disgraceful instead of a fair one, and that these men have ruined everything by their crimes: and have you, after all this, become reconciled to him? You uttered imprecations upon Philip, in the presence of the people, and swore by the life of your children that you would be glad if perdition seized him; and will you now come to the aid of Aeschines? How can perdition seize Philip, when you are trying to save those who take bribes from him? {293} Why is it that you prosecuted Moerocles for misappropriating 20 drachmae out of the sums paid by each of the lessees of the mines, and indicted Ctesiphon for the theft of sacred moneys, because he paid 7 minae into the bank three days too late; and yet, when men have taken money and confess it, and are convicted, by being caught in the very act, of having done so in order to bring about the ruin of our allies, you do not prosecute them, but even command their acquittal? {294} But the appalling character of these crimes and the great watchfulness and caution that they call for, and the triviality of the offences for which you prosecuted those other men, may further be seen in this way. Were there any men in Elis who stole public funds? It is very likely indeed. Well, had any of them anything to do with the overthrow of the democracy there? Not one of them. Again, while Olynthus was standing, were there others of the same character there? I am sure that there were. Was it then through them that Olynthus was destroyed? No. Again, do you not suppose that in Megara there was someone who was a thief and who embezzled public funds? There must have been. Well, has any such person been shown to be responsible for the recent crisis there? {295} Not one. But of what sort are the men who commit crimes of such a character and magnitude? They are those who count themselves worthy to be styled friends and guest-friends of Philip, who would fain be generals, who claim[n] to be leaders, who must needs be exalted above the people. Was not Perillus put on his trial lately before the Three Hundred at Megara, because he went to Philip's court; and did not Ptoeodorus, the first man in Megara in wealth, family, and distinction, come forward and beg him off, and send him back again to Philip? and was not the consequence that the one came back at the head of the mercenaries, while the other was churning the butter[n] at home? {296} For there is nothing, nothing, I say, in the world, which you must be so careful not to do, as not to allow any one to become more powerful than the People. I would have no man acquitted or doomed, to please any individual. Only let us be sure that the man whose actions acquit or condemn him will receive from you the verdict he deserves. {297} That is the true democratic principle. And further, it is true that many men have come to possess great influence with you at particular times—Callistratus, and again Aristophon, Diophantus, and others before them. But where did each of these exercise his primacy? In the Assembly of the People. But in the law-courts no man has ever, to this day, carried more influence than the laws and the juror's oath. Do not then allow the defendant to have such influence to-day. To prove to you that there is good reason for you not to trust, but to beware of such influence, I will read you an oracle of the gods, who always protect the city far better than do its foremost citizens. (To the clerk.) Read the oracles.