| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 22.44 | Dem. 22.54 (Greek) | >>Dem. 22.65 |
22.51Let no one understand me to say that the money ought not to have been wrung from the defaulters. It ought; but how? Even as the law enjoins, for the benefit of the other citizens. That is the spirit of democracy. For what you, men of Athens , have gained by the exaction of such paltry sums of money in this way, is nothing to what you have lost by the introduction of such habits into political life. If you care to inquire why a man would sooner live under a democracy than under an oligarchy, you will find that most obvious reason is that in a democracy everything is more easy-going.
22.52I shall not, then, trouble to show that the defendant has proved himself more brutal than any oligarchy anywhere in the world. But here, in our own city, at what period were the most outrageous things done? You will all say, “Under the Thirty Tyrants.” Now under the Thirty, as we are informed, no man forfeited the power to save his life who could hide himself at home; what we denounce the Thirty for is that they arrested men illegally in the market-place. This man displayed a brutality so far in excess of theirs that he, a public man under a democracy, turned every man's private house into a jail by conducting the Eleven into your homes.
22.53But what do you think of this, Athenians? What if a poor man, or a rich man for that matter who has spent much money and is naturally perhaps rather short of cash, should have to climb over the roof to a neighbor's house or creep under bed, to avoid being caught and dragged off to jail, or should degrade himself in some other fashion, fit for slaves and not for freemen, and should be seen thus acting by his own wife, whom he espoused as a freeman and a citizen of our state? And what if the cause of all this was Androtion, a man who is debarred by his own conduct and mode of life from seeking redress for himself, much more for the State?
22.54Yet if he were asked whether the taxes are due from our property or from our persons, he would admit, if he cared to speak the truth, that they are due from our property; it is from property that our contributions come. Then why did you drop the sequestration and scheduling of lands and houses, and proceed to imprison and insult Athenian citizens and the unfortunate resident aliens, whom you have treated with more insolence than your own slaves?
22.55Indeed, if you wanted to contrast the slave and the freeman, you would find the most important distinction in the fact that slaves are responsible in person for all offences, while freemen, even in the most unfortunate circumstances, can protect their persons. For it is in the shape of money that in the majority of cases the law must obtain satisfaction from them; but Androtion on the contrary exacted vengeance from their persons, as if they had been bond-slaves.
22.56So corrupt and selfish was his attitude towards you that he thought that his own father, imprisoned by the State for moneys due, had a right to escape, without payment and without trial, but that any other citizen, not having the means to pay, might be dragged from his own home to prison. And then, on the top of all this, as though he could do whatever he liked, he distrained upon Sinope and Phanostrate, who were prostitutes certainly, but owed no property-tax.
22.57Should anyone possibly think that those women were fitting people to suffer, yet assuredly it was not a fitting procedure—that men should be so puffed up by a chance opportunity as to march into houses and carry off the furniture of people who are not in debt. For one could point to many who are and have been “fitting persons” for such treatment. But surely such is not the language of the statutes or of the principles of the constitution, which it is your duty to uphold. In them we find pity, pardon, everything that becomes free citizens.
22.58To all such feelings the defendant is of course a stranger by birth and breeding. Many are the outrages and insults that he has had to submit to when consorting with men who had no love for him but could pay his price. For such insults, Androtion, it would have been right to vent your spite, not on the next citizen you meet, not on the women who follow your own profession, but on the father who gave you such a bringing up.
Athens , that he has never suffered, nor is likely to suffer, any inconvenience at all through his services to you, but that for his abominable and monstrous wickedness he has hitherto not paid the penalty, but will pay it now, if you on your part do what is right.
22.60Consider this point. What did he undertake to do for you, and what did you appoint him to do? To collect moneys. Anything else besides? Not a single thing! Very well; I will remind you of the items of his accounts. He collected from Leptines of Coele thirty-four drachmas, from Theoxenus of Alopece seventy drachmas or a trifle more, and from Callicrates, the son of Eupherus, and from the young son of Telestes, whose name I cannot give you—but without going into details, of all those from whom he collected money, I doubt if anyone owed more than a mina.
22.61Then do you suppose that all these men are his inveterate enemies merely because he collected this money from them? Is it not rather because he said of one of them, in the hearing of all of you in the Assembly, that he was a slave and born of slaves and ought by rights to pay the contribution of one-sixth with the resident aliens note; and of another that he had children by a harlot; of this man that his father had prostituted himself; of that man that his mother had been on the streets; that he was making an inventory of one man's peculations from the start of his career, that another had done this or that, and that a third had committed every conceivable crime—slandering them all in turn?
22.59Now that these are serious offences, contrary to every statute, he will not be able to deny; but he is so impudent that in the Assembly, contriving always an anticipation of his defence against this indictment, he dared to say that it was in your interests and for your sake that he had drawn down enmity on himself and was now in desperate peril. But I want to prove to you, men of
| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 22.44 | Dem. 22.54 (Greek) | >>Dem. 22.65 |
