| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 24.191 | Dem. 24.201 (Greek) | >>Dem. 24.212 |
24.197Compassion for Androtion, Glaucetes, and Melanopus, because they have to repay stolen money, shows a temper quite different from your refusal of compassion to everyone of the many persons here present, and of all the other citizens, whose houses you invaded with police-magistrates, receivers, and clerks at your heels; with demolishing their front-doors, dragging their bed-clothes from under them, and levying distraint on a man's maidservant, if he was living with her; and that is how you and Androtion were employed for a whole twelve-month.
24.198—Yes, it was you citizens who were the more infamously ill-used;—and as for you, you reprobate, you had far more reason to pity your fellow-citizens, who, thanks to you speech-makers, never get a moment's respite from taxpaying. Even that is not enough they are compelled to pay double, compelled by you and Androtion, who never paid income-tax in your lives.
24.199—And yet this fellow was so self-confident,—as though he could never be brought to justice for his doings,—that, with ten colleagues in office, he alone joined Androtion in making his return. Yes indeed; gratuitously and from purely unselfish motives, Timocrates provokes your hostility, introducing laws that contradict every statute, and that even, to crown all, contradict a statute of his own making! By our Lady, I think that even you must recognize his generosity!
Athens , while he is doing all this for money, while he has, to tell the truth, deliberately adopted the profession of paid agent, he does not spend his earnings on purposes that might claim the indulgence of anyone who heard of them. What purposes do I mean? Well, gentlemen of the jury, the defendant's father is in debt to the Treasury. I do not mention that by way of reproach, but because I cannot help it. And this dutiful son allows him to remain in debt!
24.201Here is a man who is going to inherit disfranchisement, if anything happens to his father, and yet does not think proper to pay the debt, but prefers to pocket the profit of his meanness so long as his father lives. Is such a man likely to keep his hands off anything?—For your own father you have no compassion; you do not think him ill-used because, while you are getting your pickings and making your profits out of the taxes you used to collect, out of the decrees you move, out of the laws you introduce, he is losing his citizen-rights for lack of a trifling sum of money. And yet you call yourself a compassionate man!
24.202—Ah, but he was a good manager for his sister. Why, if he had committed no other crime, he deserves destruction on that account alone. He has not given her in marriage, he has sold her. An enemy of yours from Corcyra , one of the faction now in power there, used to lodge at his house whenever he came here on embassy, and wanted to have his sister,—I will not say on what terms. He took the man's money, and he has given him the girl; and she is in Corcyra to this day.
24.203A man who pretends to have given his sister in marriage, but has really sold her for export; a man who supports his father's old age in the manner you know; a toad-eater who drafts decrees and does political jobs for hire,—now that you have caught him, will you not make an end of him? If not, we shall think, men of Athens , that you like lawsuits and vexations, and that you do not want to be quit of scoundrels.
24.200I will now tell you, without any hesitation, something that, in my opinion, deserves your sternest indignation. Men of
24.204I am sure that you would all agree, if asked, that all evil-doers ought to be punished; but I will try to satisfy you that this malefactor in particular deserves punishment for introducing a law detrimental to the common people. A thief, or a cutpurse, or any rogue of that sort, in the first place really injures only the man who encounters him; it is out of his power to strip everybody, or steal everybody's property; and in the second place, he brings disgrace on no one's reputation or manner of life but his own. 24.205But if a man introduces a law by which unlimited license and immunity is granted to those who seek to defraud their fellow-citizens, he is guilty in respect of the whole city, and he brings disgrace upon everybody; for an infamous statute, when ratified, is a discredit to the government that enacted it and an injury to everyone who lives under it. Will you not, then, punish, when you have caught him, a man who is doing his utmost to injure you, and to pollute you with infamy? If not, what excuse will you have? 24.206The best way to ascertain with what far-reaching designs he has framed his law, and how inimical those designs are to the established constitution, is to reflect that this is just the way that all conspirators begin, when they are trying to overthrow democracy by innovations,—they first of all release all who were formerly by law suffering this penalty for some offence. 24.207Does not this man, then, deserve, if possible, not one but three sentences of death, because, standing by himself, and of course with no expectation of crushing you, but rather of meeting his own doom in this court, if you do justice as you ought, he nevertheless imitated that crime, and attempted to release men whom the tribunals have imprisoned, by his impudent enactment that if the penalty of imprisonment has already been inflicted, or if you hereafter inflict it, upon any man, that man shall be discharged from prison?
| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 24.191 | Dem. 24.201 (Greek) | >>Dem. 24.212 |
