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The first law, then, stipulates that people shall not tell lies in the market, which seems to me a most admirable provision.1 Yet you lied in the middle of the market when you made the agreement to defraud me. But if you show that you declared to me beforehand the contributions and the debts, or that you wrote in the agreement the names of those whose existence I later discovered, I have no quarrel with you; I admit that I owe the money.
1 The first of these two laws cited by the plaintiff is mentioned also by Dem. 20.9. It was enforced by the ten agoranomoi, whose duty it was to guard against fraud in all questions of purchase. See Aristot. Ath. Pol. 51. For the second law compare Aeschin. 3.249 and Plat. Laws. 915 c.
Hyperides. Minor Attic Orators in two volumes, 2, with an English translation by J. O. Burtt, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1962.
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