[292] Andokid. de Mysteriis, sects. 27-28. καὶ Ἀνδροκλῆς ὑπὲρ τῆς βουλῆς.
[293] Andokid. de Myster. sect. 36. It seems that Diognêtus, who had been commissioner of inquiry at the time when Pythonikus presented the first information of the slave Andromachus, was himself among the parties denounced by Teukrus (And. de Mys. sects. 14, 15).
[294] Thucyd. vi, 53-60. οὐ δοκιμάζοντες τοὺς μηνυτὰς, ἀλλὰ πάντας ὑπόπτως ἀποδεχόμενοι, διὰ πονηρῶν ἀνθρώπων πίστιν πάνυ χρηστοὺς τῶν πολιτῶν ξυλλαμβάνοντες κατέδουν, χρησιμώτερον ἡγούμενοι εἶναι βασανίσαι τὸ πρᾶγμα καὶ εὑρεῖν, ἢ διὰ μηνυτοῦ πονηρίαν τινὰ καὶ χρηστὸν δοκοῦντα εἶναι αἰτιαθέντα ἀνέλεγκτον διαφυγεῖν....
... δεινὸν ποιούμενοι, εἰ τοὺς ἐπιβουλεύοντας σφῶν τῷ πλήθει μὴ εἴσονται....
[295] Andokid. de Myst. sect. 36.
[296] Plutarch (Alkib. c. 20) and Diodorus (xiii, 2) assert that this testimony was glaringly false, since on the night in question it was new moon. I presume, at least, that the remark of Diodorus refers to the deposition of Diokleidês, though he never mentions the name of the latter, and even describes the deposition referred to with many material variations as compared with Andokidês. Plutarch’s observation certainly refers to Diokleidês, whose deposition, he says, affirming that he had seen and distinguished the persons in question by the light of the moon, on a night when it was new moon, shocked all sensible men, but produced no effect upon the blind fury of the people. Wachsmuth (Hellenisch. Alterth. vol. ii, ch. viii, p. 194) copies this remark from Plutarch.
I disbelieve altogether the assertion that it was new moon on that night. Andokidês gives in great detail the deposition of Diokleidês, with a strong wish to show that it was false and perfidiously got up. But he nowhere mentions the fact that it was new moon on the night in question; though if we read his report and his comments upon the deposition of Diokleidês, we shall see that he never could have omitted such a means of discrediting the whole tale, if the fact had been so (Andokid. de Myster. sects. 37-43). Besides, it requires very good positive evidence to make us believe, that a suborned informer, giving his deposition not long after one of the most memorable nights that ever passed at Athens, would be so clumsy as to make particular reference to the circumstance that it was full moon (εἶναι δὲ πανσέληνον), if it had really been new moon.
[297] Andokid. de Myster. sects. 37-42.
[298] Considering the extreme alarm which then pervaded the Athenian mind, and their conviction that there were traitors among themselves whom yet they could not identify, it is to be noted as remarkable that they resisted the proposition of their commissioners for applying torture. We must recollect that the Athenians admitted the principle of the torture, as a good mode of eliciting truth as well as of testing depositions,—for they applied it often to the testimony of slaves,—sometimes apparently to that of metics. Their attachment to the established law, which forbade the application of it to citizens, must have been very great, to enable them to resist the great special and immediate temptation to apply it in this case to Mantitheus and Aphepsion, if only by way of exception.
The application of torture to witnesses and suspected persons, handed down from the Roman law, was in like manner recognized, and pervaded nearly all the criminal jurisprudence of Europe until the last century. I hope that the reader, after having gone through the painful narrative of the proceedings of the Athenians after the mutilation of the Hermæ, will take the trouble to peruse by way of comparison the Storia della Colonna Infame, by the eminent Alexander Manzoni, author of “I Promessi Sposi.” This little volume, including a republication of Verri’s “Osservazioni sulla Tortura,” is full both of interest and instruction. It lays open the judicial enormities committed at Milan in 1630, while the terrible pestilence was raging there, by the examining judges and the senate, in order to get evidence against certain suspected persons called Untori; that is, men who were firmly believed by the whole population, with very few exceptions, to be causing and propagating the pestilence by means of certain ointment which they applied to the doors and walls of houses. Manzoni recounts with simple, eloquent, and impressive detail, the incredible barbarity with which the official lawyers at Milan, under the authority of the senate, extorted, by force of torture, evidence against several persons, of having committed this imaginary and impossible crime. The persons thus convicted were executed under horrible torments: the house of one of them, a barber named Mora, was pulled down, and a pillar with an inscription erected upon the site, to commemorate the deed. This pillar, the Colonna Infame, remained standing in Milan until the close of the 18th century. The reader will understand, from Manzoni’s narrative, the degree to which public excitement and alarm can operate to poison and barbarize the course of justice in a Christian city, without a taint of democracy, and with professional lawyers and judges to guide the whole procedure secretly, as compared with a pagan city, ultra-democratical, where judicial procedure as well as decision was all oral, public, and multitudinous.