Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
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23.80In addition to all these provisions for legal redress there is a sixth, which the defendant has equally defied in his decree. Suppose that a man is ignorant of all the processes I have mentioned, or that the proper time for taking such proceedings has elapsed, that for any other reasons he does not choose to prosecute by those methods; if he sees the homicide frequenting places of worship or the market, he may arrest him and take him to jail; but not, as you have permitted, to his own house or wherever he chooses. When under arrest he will suffer no injury in jail until after his trial; but, if he is found guilty, he will be punished with death. On the other hand, if the person who arrested him does not get a fifth part of the votes, he will be fined a thousand drachmas. 23.81The proposals of the defendant are quite different: the accuser is to prosecute without risk, the culprit to be given up incontinently and without trial; and if any person, or indeed any entire city, shall intervene to prevent the destruction of all those usages which I have described and the overthrow of all the tribunals I have mentioned; tribunals introduced by the gods and frequented by mankind from that day to this,—and to rescue the victims of outrage and lawless violence, he proposes that any such person shall be banned; for him also he allows no hearing and no trial, but punishes him instantly and without trial. Could any decree be more monstrous and more unconstitutional?
23.82Have we any statute left? . . . Let me see it. . . . . Yes, that is the one; read it.
Law
If any man die a violent death, his kinsmen may take and hold hostages in respect of such death, until they either submit to trial for bloodguiltiness, or surrender the actual manslayers. This right is limited to three hostages and no more.
We have many well-conceived laws, men of
23.86Read the next one.
Law
And it shall not be lawful to propose a statute directed against an individual, unless the same apply to all Athenians.
The statute just read is not, like the others, taken from the Laws of Homicide, but it is just as good—as good as ever law was. The man who introduced it was of opinion that, as every citizen has an equal share in civil rights, so everybody should have an equal share in the laws; and therefore he moved that it should not be lawful to propose a law affecting any individual, unless the same applied to all Athenians. Now seeing that it is agreed that the drafting of decrees must conform to the law, a man who draws a decree for the special benefit of Charidemus, such as is not applicable to all the rest of you, must evidently be making a proposal in defiance of this statute also; of course what it is unlawful to put into a statute cannot legitimately be put into a decree.
Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
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