Against Aristogiton
There is
nothing, it appears, Athenians, which we must not expect either to hear or see
in connection with the reports which have been made; but the most remarkable
fact of all, in my opinion, confronts us now. The worst character in the city, I
should say in the whole world, Aristogiton, has come to pit himself in law
against the Areopagus on the subject of truth and justice; and the council which
has made the report is now in greater danger than this man who takes bribes
against you and who sold for twenty minas the right of free speech in the cause
of justice.
[
2]
It will be no new or alarming
experience for the defendant if he is convicted, for he has committed in the
past many other crimes meriting the death penalty and has spent more time in
prison than out of it. While he has been in debt to the state he has prosecuted
men with citizen rights, though not entitled to do so, and has committed
numerous other offences of which you have a more exact knowledge than I. It is a
most shameful and monstrous thing for this council to be suspected of making a
false report against Aristogiton and for him to be considered among you as
having more justice on his side than it has.
[
3]
For this reason, Athenians, thinking that the trial holds no dangers for him,
this man is coming forward, I believe, to test your attitude. He has often
undergone all sorts of suffering short of death, which, if God so wills it and
you are wise, he will undergo today. For you must assume, by Heracles, that
there will be no improvement in him if he is pardoned by you now, and that in
future he will not abstain from taking bribes against you if you now acquit him.
For when wickedness is in its infancy perhaps it can be checked by punishment,
but when it has grown old and has sampled the usual penalties, it is said to be
incurable.
[
4]
If therefore you wish depravity to
grow up ingrained in
Athens, you
should preserve Aristogiton and allow him to act there as he pleases. But if you
hate the wicked and accursed and can recall with resentment what this man has
done in the past, kill him, for he dared to take money from Harpalus, who he
knew was coming to seize your city. Cut short his excuses and deceptive
arguments, on which he now depends when he appears before you.
[
5]
Do you realize that, awkward
though the arrival of Harpalus was, it has been an advantage to the city in one
respect, because it has given you a sure means of testing those who give up
everything to the enemies of
Athens
for a payment of silver or gold? Do not be lax, Athenians, or weary of punishing
the guilty; purge the city of bribery to the utmost of your ability. Do not ask
for arguments from me when you see that the crimes have been plainly attributed
to those whom the council has reported.
[
6]
[Or ought you to spare the defendant on account of his ancestry and
his moderation, or because he has done you many public and private
services?]
1 What information do you lack that makes you ask for
arguments against the defendant here before you? What if we, the accusers, all
ten of us, use up all the water in our clocks and proclaim that it is a terrible
thing to release men who have been caught with bribes against the city in their
very hands; will that make the council's report against Aristogiton true and
just?
[
7]
Or suppose that each of us assumes that
you are just as well aware as we on which side justice lies in the present
trials, and so leaves the platform after a short speech; will the report then be
a false one, unjustly made by the Areopagites? Or don't you realize that to take
bribes in order to betray the city's interests is one of the greatest crimes
causing the most irreparable harm to cities?
[
8]
No doubt I shall be told that the defendant
is himself a man of sober character coming of a good family, that he has done
you many noble services in private and in public life and that therefore you are
justified in sparing him. You must all have often heard that, when Aristogiton's
father Cydimachus was condemned to death and fled from the city, this admirable
son allowed his own father to lack the bare necessities of life, while he
survived, and do without a proper burial when he died: a fact for which evidence
was often brought against him;
[
9]
or again, that
the man himself, on being taken to prison for the first time,—no doubt
you realize that he has often been imprisoned—dared to behave in such
a way there that the inmates voted that no one should either light a fire for
him or sit at meals or share the usual sacrifices with him. Reflect, Athenians;
what sort of character must we suppose this man to have, who was thrown into
prison for criminal conduct
[
10]
and when he was
there, among those who had been segregated from the rest of the world as felons,
was looked upon as so debased that even there he was not thought worthy of the
same treatment as the rest? It is said, in fact, that he was caught thieving
among them and that, if there had been any other place more degraded where they
could have isolated men who stole in prison, this monster would have been
conducted there. These facts, as I said just now, were established by evidence
against Aristogiton, as is well known, when the lot fell to him to be custodian
of the exchange but he was rejected by those who then decided the appointment to
that office.
2
[
11]
Do you then feign ignorance among yourselves
and give way to pity when the man concerning whom you are about to vote is
Aristogiton, who did not pity his own father when reduced to starvation? Do you
still wish to hear us talk about the damages he must pay, when you know quite
well that his whole life, as well as his recent conduct, justifies the extreme
penalty?
[
12]
Was it not Aristogiton, Athenians,
who made in writing such lying assertions about the priestess of Artemis
Brauronia
3and her relatives, that when you discovered
the truth from his accusers, you fined him five talents, a sum equal to the fine
set down in an indictment for illegal proposals? Has he not persisted in
maligning every one of you he meets, though he has not yet paid up, and in
speaking and proposing measures in the Assembly, regardless of all the penalties
against wrongdoers which the laws prescribe?
[
13]
And finally, when an information was lodged against him by Lycurgus,
4and he was convicted, a debtor to the state without the
right to speak in public, when he had been handed over to the Eleven in
accordance with the laws, <was he not seen>
5walking about in
the front of the lawcourts, and used he not to sit on the seat of the Prytanes?
[
14]
Well then,
Athenians, if a man has often been committed to you lawfully for punishment,
condemned on information lodged by citizens, if neither the Eleven nor the
prison have been able to restrain him, will you want to use him as a counsellor?
The law demands that the herald shall first pray, amid dead silence, before he
surrenders to you the task of deliberating on public affairs. Will you then
allow an impious wretch, who has proved wicked in his dealings with everyone,
and in particular his own father, to share in citizenship with you, with your
families and kinsmen?
[
15]
After rejecting all
thought of pardon for Demades and Demosthenes, because they were proved to have
been taking bribes against you, and punishing them,—quite rightly,
though you knew that they had served you during their administration, certainly
in many respects if not in everything,—will you acquit this accursed
man who has not done you a service ever since he has been in politics but has
been the greatest possible menace? Would not everyone reproach you if you
accepted such a person as your adviser? For when you are addressed by a man
whose wickedness is both notorious and undeniable and a byword among all
Athenians, the bystanders will wonder whether you who listen to him have no
better advisers or whether you enjoy hearing such people.
[
16]
Like the early lawgivers, Athenians, who made laws to deal
with those addressing your ancestors in the Assembly, you too should try, by
your behavior as listeners, to make the speakers who come before you better.
What was the attitude of the lawgivers to these men? In the first place, at
every sitting of the Assembly they publicly proclaimed curses against
wrongdoers, calling down destruction on any who, after accepting bribes, made
speeches or proposals upon state affairs, and to that class Aristogiton now
belongs.
[
17]
Secondly, they provided in the laws
for indictments for bribery, and this is the only offence for which they imposed
a payment equal to ten times the assessment of damages,
6in
the belief that one who is ready to be paid for the opinions which he is going
to express in the Assembly has at heart, when he is speaking, not the interests
of the people but the welfare of those who have paid him. Now the council has
reported Aristogiton as guilty of this. Moreover, when choosing a man for public
office they used to ask what his personal character was, whether he treated his
parents well, whether he had served the city in the field, whether he had an
ancestral cult or paid taxes.
[
18]
Aristogiton
could not claim one of these qualifications for himself. So far from treating
his parents well this man has ill-treated his own father. When you were all
serving in the army he was in prison; and, far from being able to point to any
memorial of his father, Athenians, he did not give him a proper funeral even in
Eretria where he died.
7 While other Athenians are contributing from their own
purses this man has not even paid up all the money to defray the public debts
which he incurred.
[
19]
In fact he has never ceased
to contravene all the laws, and his is the one case of those on which the
Areopagus has reported where you had inquired yourselves and already knew the
answer. For your knowledge that this man is a rogue and a criminal was not
gained from the council; you are all very well aware of his wickedness, and
hence the statement so often made applies here also, namely that, while you are
passing judgement on the defendant, the bystanders and everyone besides are
passing judgement on you.
[
20]
Therefore it is your duty as a sensible jury, Athenians, not to
vote against yourselves or the rest of
Athens; you should sentence him unanimously to be handed over
to the executioners for the death penalty. Do not be traitors and fail to give
the honest verdict demanded by your oath. Remember that this man has been
convicted by the council of taking bribes against you, convicted of ill-treating
him, to use the mildest term, by his father during his life and after his death,
condemned by the people's vote and handed over to you for punishment.
[
21]
Remember that this man has caused a deal of harm and
has now been caught doing wrong in circumstances which make it shameful for you,
his judges, to release him unpunished. For if you do so, how are you going to
vote on the other reports, Athenians? What justification will you give for
having condemned those men whom you have already tried? What reason will you
have, when you were clearly anxious for the council to report those who had
taken the money, for failing obviously to punish the men whose names they
submit?
[
22]
You must not imagine that these trials
are private issues concerning no one but the men reported; they are public and
concern the rest of us as well. A case of bribery and treason tried before you
will affect others in the future in two possible ways: either it will make them
accept bribes against you unhesitatingly in the knowledge that they will not be
brought to justice, or it will make them afraid to take them, since they will
know that those who are caught will be punished in a manner suited to the crime.
[
23]
Do you not know that now the fear of what
you will do restrains those who are grasping for the money offered for use
against you and often makes them turn their backs on the bribe, and that the
people's decree, ordering the council to inquire about this money, has prevented
even those who brought the gold into the country from admitting their action?
[
24]
It was a noble decree, Athenians, a noble
decree of your ancestors on this question, providing for a pillar on the
Acropolis at the time when Arthmius, son of Pithonax, the Zelite, is said to
have brought the gold from the Persians to corrupt the Greeks.
8 For before anyone had accepted
it or given proof of his character they sentenced the man who had brought the
gold to exile and banished him completely from the country. This decision, as I
said, they engraved on a bronze pillar and set up on the Acropolis as a lesson
for you their descendants; for they believed that the man who accepted money in
any way at all had in mind the interests of the donors rather than those of the
city.
[
25]
His was the only case in which they
added the reason why the people banished him from the city, explicitly writing
on the pillar that Arthmius, son of Pithonax, the Zelite, was an enemy of the
people and its allies, he and his descendants, and was exiled from
Athens because he had brought the Persian
gold to the
Peloponnese. And yet if the
people regarded the gold in the
Peloponnese as a source of great danger to
Greece, how can we remain unmoved at the sight
of bribery in the city itself? Please attend to the inscription on the
pillar.“
Inscription
”
[
26]
Now what do you
think those men would have done, Athenians, if they had caught a general or an
orator, one of their own citizens, accepting bribes against the interests of
their country, when they so justly and wisely expelled a man who was alien to
Greece in birth and character? That
is the reason why they faced danger against the barbarian worthily of the city
and their ancestors.
9