| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 25.17 | Dem. 25.28 (Greek) | >>Dem. 25.37 |
25.24All the magistrates who are chosen from you by lot, as soon as the attendant cries “Strangers must withdraw,” control the laws which they were appointed to administer and cannot be disturbed by the most unruly. There are thousands of other benefits. All the noble and reverend qualities that adorn and preserve our city,—sobriety, orderliness, the respect of your younger men for parents and elders—hold their own, backed by the laws, against the base qualities of indecency, audacity, and shamelessness. For vice is vigorous, daring, and grasping; on the other hand probity is peaceful, retiring, inactive, and terribly liable to come off second-best. Therefore those of you who sit upon juries ought to protect and strengthen the laws, for with the help of the laws the good overcome the bad.
25.25If not, all is dissolved, broken up, confounded, and the city becomes the prey of the most profligate and shameless. For tell me this, in Heaven's name; if everyone in the city copied the audacity and shamelessness of Aristogeiton and argued in the same way as he, that in a democracy a man has an unlimited right to say and do whatever he likes, as long as he does not care what reputation such conduct will bring him, and that no one will put him to death at once for any of his misdoings;
25.26if, acting on this principle, the citizen rejected at the ballot or at the election should put himself on an equality with the chosen citizen; if, in a word, neither young nor old should do his duty, but each man, banishing all discipline from life, should regard his own wish as law, as authority, as all in all—if, I say, we should act like this, could the government continue to be carried on? What? Would the laws be any longer valid? What violence, insolence and lawlessness there would be throughout the city every day! What scurrility instead of our present decency of language and behavior!
25.27Why need one repeat that order is everywhere maintained by the laws and by obedience to the laws? You yourselves have the sole right of judging our case, though every Athenian was in the ballot and all, I am sure, wanted to be allotted to this court. Why is this? Because by lot you were chosen and then assigned to this case. Those are the instructions of the law. And then will you, who owe your presence here to the laws, allow a man, who flouts the laws by word and deed, to escape from your grasp? Will none of you show anger or bitterness at this shameless ruffian's defiance of the laws?
Athens , by the decisions of three tribunals, by the registers of the archons and of the collectors of taxes, by the indictment for wrongful entry in which you yourself are the plaintiff, curbed, I might almost say, by chains of steel, you wriggle and force your way through all and imagine that by weaving excuses and trumping up false charges you can overturn all the principles of justice.
Athens , that he deserves death both for what he is doing now and much more, or at least no less, for what he obviously will do, if he gets the power and opportunity from you; which Heaven forfend!
25.31It is also strange if anyone of you is ignorant that for nothing that is honorable or useful or worthy of our city is he of any use. May Zeus and all the gods grant that Athens may never be so short of real men that any honorable task should have to be performed by an Aristogeiton! We ought to pray Heaven that the occasion may never arise for which such a monster could be found useful. But should it possibly arise, it would be a greater blessing for the city that those who wish for its fall should lack the instrument of their designs than that this fellow should be released and ready to their hand.
25.32For what fatal or dangerous act will he shrink from, men of Athens ,—this polluted wretch, infected with hereditary hatred of democracy? What other man would sooner overthrow the State, if only—which Heaven forbid!—he should gain the power? Do you not see that his character and his policy are not guided by reason or by self-respect, but by recklessness? note Or rather, his policy is sheer recklessness. Now that is the very worst quality for its possessor, terribly dangerous for everyone else, and for the State intolerable. For the reckless man has lost all control of himself, all hope of rational safety, and can only be saved, if at all, by some unexpected and incalculable accident.
25.28Vilest of all living men! Shut out from your right of speech, not by barriers or doors which any man might break open, but by so many heavy penalties, which are registered in the temple of the Goddess, you are trying to force your way in and to approach those precincts from which the laws exclude you. Debarred by every right that holds good in
25.29I will, however, by a clear and forcible example show the jury that they ought not to overlook such conduct; no, not in a single particular. Imagine for a moment that someone proposed that speakers in the Assembly should be confined to the youngest citizens, or to the richest, or to those who had performed a public service, or to some similar category. I am sure you would have him put to death for trying to overthrow the democracy. And indeed you would be justified. 25.30Yet any one of these proposals is less dangerous than if it were proposed that speakers should belong to one of the classes to which the defendant belongs—law-breakers, jail-birds, sons of criminals put to death by the people, citizens disqualified after obtaining office by lot, public debtors, men totally disfranchised, or men who by repute and in fact are utter rascals. All these descriptions fit the defendant and apply to those who resemble him in disposition. I think, men of
| Demosthenes, Speeches (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose; rhetoric] [word count] [lemma count] [Dem.]. | ||
| <<Dem. 25.17 | Dem. 25.28 (Greek) | >>Dem. 25.37 |
