Greek Texts & Translations

25.59What penalty is adequate for a man who has committed such offences? What retribution does he deserve? To my thinking death is too light a sentence.

25.60One more instance, then, of his private crimes, and I will pass over the rest. Before Aristogeiton was released, a man of Tanagra was thrown into the prison until he could find bail. Aristogeiton accosts him and, while chatting on some topic or other, filches the pocket-book that he had on him; and when the man charged him with the theft and made a to-do about it, saying that no one else could have taken it, he so far forgot all decency that he tried to strike him. 25.61But the Tanagran, a fresh-caught fish, was getting the better of the defendant, who was thoroughly pickled, having been long in jail. So when it came to this, he swallows the other man's nose. Then the unfortunate victim of this outrage abandoned the search for his pocket-book, which was afterwards found in a chest of which the defendant possessed the key. After that the inmates of the prison passed a resolution not to share fire or light, food or drink with him, not to receive anything from him, not to give him anything. 25.62To prove the truth of my statements, please call the man whose nose this monster bit off and swallowed.Deposition
What a fine performance for your popular orator! What a privilege to hear words of wisdom from a man with such a record as this! Now read also the precious resolution that was passed about him.Resolution

25.63Are you not ashamed then, men of Athens, if the men who had been thrown into prison for villainy and vice thought him so much more villainous than them selves that they forbade all intercourse with him, while you are ready to admit him to intercourse with yourselves, though the laws have placed him outside the pale of the constitution? What did you find to commend in his life or conduct? Which of all his actions has failed to move your indignation? Is he not impious, blood-thirsty, unclean, and a black mailer?

25.64And yet, in spite of his performances and his character, he misses no opportunity in the Assembly of bellowing, “I, only I, am your sincere well-wisher. All these others are in a cabal. You are betrayed. My patriotism is all you have left.” I should like to examine the source and origin of this great and wonderful patriotism of his, so that, if it is as he says, you may trust it and benefit by it; but if not, that you may be on your guard. 25.65Because you condemned his father to death and sold his mother when she was found guilty of defrauding her emancipator, do you suppose that that makes him well-disposed to you? By Zeus and all the gods, that is absurd. For if he is well-disposed towards father and mother, and so observes the great law of nature, which is laid down alike for man and beast, that all should love their parents, 25.66then he must clearly be ill-disposed to those who have destroyed them and to their laws and their constitution. But if he has no regard for these things, I should like to know who that sees how he has renounced all affection for his parents, can believe in his pretended zeal for the people; for the man who neglects his parents I regard as unworthy of trust and hateful alike to gods and men. 25.67But I shall be told it is because you condemned him on information laid and twice put him and his brother into prison; it is for this reason that he is your well-wisher. But that too is ridiculous. Or because you disqualified him for the office to which he had been allotted? Or because you found him guilty of a breach of the constitution? Or because you fined him ten talents? Or because you habitually point the finger of scorn at him as the vilest of all men in the world? 25.68Or because, as long as the present laws and constitution stand, he cannot clear himself of these reproaches? Then why is he well-disposed to you? It is because, in his own words, he is impudent. Why is the impudent man so called save because, being lost to a sense of shame, he dares to state what is not, and never will be, true? And that is precisely what the defendant does.

25.69Now there are some facts about the information laid against him which Lycurgus seems to have passed over, but which I had better lay before you; for I think you should examine the defendant and the rights of the present case as carefully as you would scrutinize a private debt. Suppose then that A accused B of owing him money, and B denied it. If the registered terms of the loan were still to be read, or if the pillars which marked the mortgaged property were still standing, you would clearly regard as impudent the man who denied the transaction; but if it was shown that these proofs no longer existed, then you would regard the accuser as impudent. That is natural.