| Lycurgus, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Lycurg.]. | ||
| <<Lycurg. 1.111 | Lycurg. 1.120 (Greek) | >>Lycurg. 1.129 |
1.116Your ancestors inflicted the extreme penalty on men who simply lent the traitor verbal help. Will you fall so short of their example as to let go as innocent the man who abandoned the state in deed as well as word? Do not do it, gentlemen of the jury. Do not give a verdict unworthy of yourselves; for it would be both impious and contrary to your traditions. If only one such decree were recorded, we might have said that anger rather than real conviction had prompted it. But when the same punishment was meted out by them to all alike it is surely plain that our ancestors were by nature bound to make war an all such crimes.
1.117When Hipparchus, the son of Charmus, note did not stand his trial for treason before the people but let the case go by default, they sentenced him to death. Then, as they did not secure his person to answer for the crime, they took down his statue from the Acropolis and, melting it down, made a pillar of it, on which they decreed that the names of sinners and traitors should be inscribed. Hipparchus himself has his name recorded on this pillar and all other traitors too.
1.118Clerk, please take the decree which authorized the statue of Hipparchus to be taken down from the Acropolis and then the inscription at the base of the pillar with the names of the traitors later engraved upon it and read them out.Attica , how will you treat Leocrates who in wartime fled from his city and his country to Rhodes and deserted the state? Will you not kill him? If you do not, how can you pass as the descendants of those men?
Salamis . note Though he had only attempted to speak treason against the city, the Council, after removing their crowns, killed him with their own hands. It is an admirable decree, gentlemen, and well worthy of your ancestors. Their nobility, revealed in their characters, was shown too in their punishment of criminals.
Decree and Text of Inscription on the Pillar
1.119What is your impression of them, gentlemen? Had they the same attitude as yourselves towards wrongdoers? Or did they, by obliterating the memorial of the traitor, since they could not command his person, punish him with all the means at their disposal? The simple fact of melting down the bronze statue was not enough for them; they wished to leave to their successors a lasting memorial of their attitude to traitors.
1.120Let the jury hear the other decree, clerk, relating to the men who withdrew to Decelea note when the people were besieged by the Spartans, so that they will realize that the punishments inflicted by our ancestors on traitors were uniform and self-consistent. Read it.
Decree
1.121You hear this decree too, gentlemen. It says that they condemned any who moved to Decelea in war-time and laid it down that those who were caught returning should be led by any Athenian who cared to do so to the Thesmothetae who should take them into custody and hand them over to the executioner. note If they dealt thus with men who merely changed their place in
1.122You ought also to hear the decree relating to the man executed in
Decree
1.123What is your view, gentlemen? Do you think that if you wish to emulate your forefathers, it is in keeping to allow Leacrates to live? When they dispatched like that one who merely betrayed with his lips a city already desolate, how ought you, whose city prospered at the time, to treat the man who did in very fact desert it? Ought you not to outdo them in severity? When they chastised so sternly those who tried to rob them of the security which the people offered, note how ought you to treat a traitor to the people's own safety? And if they, from considerations of honor only, took vengeance on criminals in this way, how should you react when your country is at stake?
1.124These instances suffice to show you the attitude of our ancestors towards those who broke the city's laws. Nevertheless I want also to remind you of the pillar in the Council Chamber which commemorates traitors and enemies of democracy. For if my point is backed by frequent illustrations, I am rendering your verdict easy. After the rule of the Thirty, your fathers, who had suffered from citizens what no other Greek had ever thought fit to inflict and had barely managed to return to their country, barred all the paths to crime, having learnt by experience the principles and methods followed by men who wished to overthrow democracy. 1.125For they established it by decree and oath that anyone who found a person aspiring to tyranny or attempting to betray the city or overthrow the democracy should be guiltless if he killed him. note They thought it better that imagined culprits should perish than that they themselves should have a real experience of slavery, holding that citizens must simply live in such a manner as to avoid the very suspicion of any of these crimes. Please take the decree.
Decree
| Lycurgus, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Lycurg.]. | ||
| <<Lycurg. 1.111 | Lycurg. 1.120 (Greek) | >>Lycurg. 1.129 |
