Against Leocrates
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Original / primary: Perseus Eng2
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We have therefore good reason to thank Euripides, because, apart from his other merits as a poet, he chose this subject for a play,
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believing that in the conduct of those people the citizens would have a fine example which they could keep before them and so implant in their hearts a love of their country. You must hear the iambic lines, gentlemen of the jury, which, in the play, are spoken by the mother of the girl. You will find in them a greatness of spirit and a nobility worthy of
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Athens
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and a daughter of Cephisus.
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Speech from Euripides
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He wins men’s hearts who with a ready hand
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Confers his favors; he who in the doing
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Delays and falters is less generous.
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But I consent to give my child to die
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For many reasons: first there is no state
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I count more worthy to accept my gift
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Than Athens, peopled by no alien race.
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For we are of this soil, while other towns,
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Formed as by hazard in a game of draughts,
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Take their inhabitants from diverse parts.
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He who adopts a city, having left
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Some other town, resembles a bad peg
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Fixed into wood of better quality,
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A citizen in name but not in fact.
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And secondly: it is that we may guard
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Our country and the altars of the gods
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That we get children for ourselves at all.
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This city, though it bears a single name,
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Holds many people in it. Should I then
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Destroy all these, when it is in my power
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To give one girl to die on their behalf?
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The mere ability to count, and tell
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The greater from the less, convinces me
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That this, the ruin of one person’s home,
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Is of less consequence and brings less grief
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Than would result if the whole city fell.
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If I had sons at home instead of girls,
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When hostile flames beset the city’s walls,
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Should I not send them forth into the fight,
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Though fearing for them? May my children then
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Fight also, vie with men, and not become
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Mere shapes of vanity within the state.
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And yet, when mothers send their sons to war
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With tears, they often daunt them as they leave.
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I hate the women who above all else
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Prefer their sons to live and put this thought
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Before their honor, urging cowardice.
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But if they fall in battle they obtain
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A common grave and glory which they share
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With many others; whereas she, my child,
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By dying for this city will attain
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A garland destined solely for herself.
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And she will save her mother and you too
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And both her sisters. Is it right to scorn
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Honors like these? Except in nature’s way
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This girl whom I shall give for sacrifice
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To save her native land is not my own.
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And if the city falls, what further chance
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Shall I have left me to enjoy my child?
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So far as rests with me, all shall be saved.
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Let others rule in Athens; I will be
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Her savior, and without my wish no man
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Shall harm what most concerns our common good,
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The ancient laws our fathers handed down.
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Eumolpus and his slavish Thracian train
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Shall set no trident in our midst or deck
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It round with garlands, where the olive tree
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And Gorgon’s golden head have been revered;
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Nor shall Athena meet with utter scorn.
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Come, citizens, and use my travail’s fruit
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To save yourselves and conquer, knowing well
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That I could never hesitate to save
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This city for the sake of one poor life.
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My country, were the love of all your sons
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As great as mine! You could not suffer ill,
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And we possessing you would live secure.
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Euripides
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On these verses, gentlemen, your fathers were brought up. All women are by nature fond of children, but this one Euripides portrayed as loving her country more than her offspring and made it clear that, if women bring themselves to act like this, men should show towards their country a devotion which cannot be surpassed, not forsake it and flee, as Leocrates did, nor disgrace it before the whole of Greece.
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I want also to recommend Homer to you. In your fathers’ eyes he was a poet of such worth that they passed a law that every four years at the Panathenaea he alone of all the poets should have his works recited
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; and thus they showed the Greeks their admiration for the noblest deeds. They were right to do so. Laws are too brief to give instruction: they merely state the things that must be done; but poets, depicting life itself, select the noblest actions and so through argument and demonstration convert men’s hearts.
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Thus Hector, while exhorting the Trojans to defend their country, speaks these words:
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Fight on unresting by the ships; and if some meet their fate
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By wound of dart, or battling hand to hand, then let them die.
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To fall in combat for your country’s sake is no disgrace;
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For wife and child will live unharmed, and home and plot last on,
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If once the Achaeans leave and sail their ships to their own land.
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Hom. Il. 15.494
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These are the lines, gentlemen, to which your forefathers listened, and such are the deeds which they emulated. Thus they developed such courage that they were ready to die, not for their country alone, but for the whole of Greece as a land in whose heritage they shared. Certainly those who confronted the barbarians at Marathon, by defeating an army from the whole of Asia, won, at their own peril, security for every Greek alike. They gave themselves no credit for glory but valued rather conduct deserving of it, whereby they made themselves the champions of the Greeks and lords of the barbarians. Their pursuit of valor was no idle boast; they displayed it in action to the world.
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Mark how the men who lived at Athens then excelled in public, and in private life; so greatly that when in days gone by the Spartans, so renowned for courage, were at war with the Messenians the god advised them to take a leader from us; for so they would defeat their enemies. And yet if the god decided that the leaders sent from Athens were better than the two descendants of Heracles who in succession reign at Sparta, must we not conclude that nothing could surpass the valor of our ancestors?
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Does any Greek not know that they took Tyrtaeus from our city
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to be their leader and with him defeated their enemies and established their system of training for the young, thus wisely providing for the immediate danger and for their whole future too? For Tyrtaeus left them elegiac poems by his own hand, and through listening to these they are trained to be brave.
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Though they have no regard for other poets, they valued his works so highly that they passed a law which provides that their men, after taking the field, shall be summoned to the king’s tent to hear the verses of Tyrtaeus all together, holding that this of all things would make them most ready to die for their country. It will be profitable for you to hear these elegiac verses too, that you may know what sort of conduct brought men fame among the Spartans.
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Nobly comes death to him who in the van
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Fighting for fatherland has made his stand.
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Shame and despite attend the coward’s flight,
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Who, leaving native town and fruitful land,
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Wanders, a homeless beggar, with his kin,
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True wife, old father, mother, tender child.
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Unwelcome will he be where’er he goes,
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Bowed dawn with hardship and by want defiled.
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Bringing his house dishonor, he belies
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His noble mien, a prey to fear and shame.
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Thus roams the waif unpitied and unloved,
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He and the line that after bears his name.
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Be stalwart then. Think not of life or limb;
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Shielding our land and children let us die.
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Youths, brave the fight together. Be not first
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To yield to craven cowardice and fly.
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Make large your hearts within you. Undismayed
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Engage in battle with grown men. Be bold;
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And standing fast forsake not those whose feet
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No longer keep their swiftness. Guard the old.
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For shame it is to see an elder fall,
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Down in the forefront, smitten in the strife,
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Before the youths, with grey beard, hair grown white,
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To breathe out in the dust his valiant life,
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Clasping his bloody groin with clinging hands,
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(Fit sight indeed to kindle wrath and shame!)
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His body bared. But those whom youth’s sweet flower
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Adorns unfaded nothing can defame.
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Honor of men is theirs, in life, and women’s love;
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Fair are they too when in the van laid low.
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Then clench your teeth and, with both feet astride,
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Firm planted on the ground withstand the foe.
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Tyrtaeus
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They are fine lines, gentlemen, and a lesson too for those who wish to heed them. Such was the courage of the men who used to hear them that they disputed with our city for supremacy; no matter for surprise, since the most gallant feats had been performed by either people. Your ancestors defeated the barbarians who first set foot in Attica, demonstrating clearly the superiority of valor over wealth and courage over numbers. The Spartans took the field at Thermopylae, and, though their fortune was less happy, in bravery they far surpassed all rivals.
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And so over their graves a testimony to their courage can be seen, faithfully engraved for every Greek to read: to the Spartans:
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Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
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That here obedient to their laws we lie.
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Simonides
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And to your ancestors:
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Athenians, guarding Greece, subdued in fight
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At Marathon the gilded Persians’ might.
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i. 42):
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Dic, hospes, Spartae nos te hic vidisse iacentes
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dum sanctis patriae legibus obsequimur.
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Simonides
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These are noble lines for us to remember, Athenians; they are a tribute to those whose deeds they record and an undying glory to the city. But Leocrates has not acted thus. Deliberately he sullied that honor which the city has accumulated from the earliest times. Therefore if you kill him all Greeks will believe that you too hate such acts as his. If not, you will rob your forbears of their long-lived renown, and will do grievous harm to your fellow citizens. For those who do not admire our ancestors will try to imitate Leocrates believing, that although among men of the past the old virtues had a place of honor, in your eyes shamelessness, treachery and cowardice are held in most esteem.
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If I am unable to show you what your attitude towards such men should be, remember your ancestors and the methods of punishment which they employed against them. Capable as they were of the noblest actions, they were no less ready to punish what was base. Think of them, gentlemen; think how enraged they were with traitors and how they looked on them as common enemies of the city.
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You remember when Phrynichus
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was murdered at night beside the fountain in the osier beds by Apollodorus and Thrasybulus, who were later caught and put in the prison by the friends of Phrynichus. The people noted what had happened and, releasing the prisoners, held an inquiry after torture. On investigation they found that Phrynichus had been trying to betray the city and that his murderers had been unjustly imprisoned.
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They decreed publicly, on the motion of Critias, that the dead man should be tried for treason, and that if it were found that this was a tratior who had been buried in the country, his bones should be dug up and removed from
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Attica
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,
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so that the land should not have lying in it even the bones of one who had betrayed his country and his city.
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They decreed also that if any persons defended the dead man and he were found guilty, they should be liable to the same punishment as he. Thus, in their view, it was wrong even to assist men who had deserted others; and to try to save the traitor would be to betray the city no less than he. In this way then, by hating wrongdoers and by passing such measures against them, they brought themselves safely out of dangers. Produce the decree for them, clerk, and read it.
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Decree You hear this decree, gentlemen. After it was passed your ancestors dug up the traitor’s bones and cast them out of Attica; they killed his defenders, Aristarchus and Alexicles, and even refused them burial in the country. Will you then, who have the very person who has betrayed the city alive and at the mercy of your vote, let him go unpunished?
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Your ancestors inflicted the extreme penalty on men who simply lent the traitor verbal help. Will you fall so short of their example as to let go as innocent the man who abandoned the state in deed as well as word? Do not do it, gentlemen of the jury. Do not give a verdict unworthy of yourselves; for it would be both impious and contrary to your traditions. If only one such decree were recorded, we might have said that anger rather than real conviction had prompted it. But when the same punishment was meted out by them to all alike it is surely plain that our ancestors were by nature bound to make war an all such crimes.
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When Hipparchus, the son of Charmus,
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did not stand his trial for treason before the people but let the case go by default, they sentenced him to death. Then, as they did not secure his person to answer for the crime, they took down his statue from the Acropolis and, melting it down, made a pillar of it, on which they decreed that the names of sinners and traitors should be inscribed. Hipparchus himself has his name recorded on this pillar and all other traitors too.
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Clerk, please take the decree which authorized the statue of Hipparchus to be taken down from the Acropolis and then the inscription at the base of the pillar with the names of the traitors later engraved upon it and read them out.
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Decree and Text of Inscription on the Pillar What is your impression of them, gentlemen? Had they the same attitude as yourselves towards wrongdoers? Or did they, by obliterating the memorial of the traitor, since they could not command his person, punish him with all the means at their disposal? The simple fact of melting down the bronze statue was not enough for them; they wished to leave to their successors a lasting memorial of their attitude to traitors.
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Let the jury hear the other decree, clerk, relating to the men who withdrew to Decelea
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when the people were besieged by the Spartans, so that they will realize that the punishments inflicted by our ancestors on traitors were uniform and self-consistent. Read it.
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Decree You hear this decree too, gentlemen. It says that they condemned any who moved to Decelea in war-time and laid it down that those who were caught returning should be led by any Athenian who cared to do so to the Thesmothetae who should take them into custody and hand them over to the executioner.Literally: the man in charge of the pit. τὸ ὄρυγμα is the same as τὸ βάραθρον, the cleft into which criminals at Athens were thrown. If they dealt thus with men who merely changed their place in Attica, how will you treat Leocrates who in wartime fled from his city and his country to Rhodes and deserted the state? Will you not kill him? If you do not, how can you pass as the descendants of those men?
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You ought also to hear the decree relating to the man executed in
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Salamis
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.
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Though he had only attempted to speak treason against the city, the Council, after removing their crowns, killed him with their own hands. It is an admirable decree, gentlemen, and well worthy of your ancestors. Their nobility, revealed in their characters, was shown too in their punishment of criminals.
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Decree What is your view, gentlemen? Do you think that if you wish to emulate your forefathers, it is in keeping to allow Leacrates to live? When they dispatched like that one who merely betrayed with his lips a city already desolate, how ought you, whose city prospered at the time, to treat the man who did in very fact desert it? Ought you not to outdo them in severity? When they chastised so sternly those who tried to rob them of the security which the people offered,i.e. those who deserted to Decelea. The sense seems to demand an object for ἀποστερεῖν. Hence the proposals by Reiske and Blass to supply one. how ought you to treat a traitor to the people’s own safety? And if they, from considerations of honor only, took vengeance on criminals in this way, how should you react when your country is at stake?
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These instances suffice to show you the attitude of our ancestors towards those who broke the city’s laws. Nevertheless I want also to remind you of the pillar in the Council Chamber which commemorates traitors and enemies of democracy. For if my point is backed by frequent illustrations, I am rendering your verdict easy. After the rule of the Thirty, your fathers, who had suffered from citizens what no other Greek had ever thought fit to inflict and had barely managed to return to their country, barred all the paths to crime, having learnt by experience the principles and methods followed by men who wished to overthrow democracy.
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For they established it by decree and oath that anyone who found a person aspiring to tyranny or attempting to betray the city or overthrow the democracy should be guiltless if he killed him.
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They thought it better that imagined culprits should perish than that they themselves should have a real experience of slavery, holding that citizens must simply live in such a manner as to avoid the very suspicion of any of these crimes. Please take the decree.
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Decree These words, gentlemen, they inscribed on the pillar, erecting it in the Council Chamber as a reminder to those who daily met in council over affairs of state what their attitude to men like this should be, and hence they swore a common oath to kill them if they saw them even contemplating such conduct. Naturally enough. For where other offences are concerned, the punishment should follow on the crime; but in cases of treason or the overthrow of a democracy it should precede it. If you let slip the moment when the criminals are contemplating some treasonable act against their country, you cannot afterwards bring them to justice for their crimes, since by then they are too powerful to be punished by those whom they have wronged.
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Let this foresight, gentlemen, and these actions be the inspiration to you that they should. Remember, when you vote, the temper of your forbears, and urge each other to bring in today, before you leave the court, a verdict modelled to their pattern. You have memorials, you have examples of the punishments they meted out, embodied in the decrees concerning criminals. You have sworn in the decree of Demophantus to kill the man who betrays his country, whether by word or deed, hand or vote. I say you; for you must not think that, as heirs to the riches bequeathed by your ancestors, you can yet renounce your share in their oaths or in the pledge your fathers gave as a security to the gods, thereby enjoying the prosperity of their city.
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Your city was not alone in dealing thus with traitors. The Spartans were the same. Please do not think me tedious, gentlemen, if I allude often to these men. We shall be well advised to take examples of just conduct from a city which has good laws, and so be surer that each of you will give a just verdict in keeping with his oath. The Spartans, you remember, caught their king Pausanias trying to betray Greece to the Persians. He escaped in time into the temple of the Brazen House, but they walled up the door, took off the roof and mounted guard in a circle round it, remaining at their posts until they had starved him to death
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and made his punishment a proof to all that even divine assistance is not vouchsafed to traitors.
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And it is right that it should not be; for impiety towards the gods is the first crime by which they show their wickedness, since they deprive them of their traditional cults. But I have yet to give you the best illustration of the prevailing practice at
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Sparta
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. They passed a law, covering all who refused to risk their lives for their country, which expressly stated that they should be put to death. Thus the punishment which they laid down was the very fate which traitors most fear; survival after war was to be subject to a scrutiny which might involve disgrace and death. Let me convince you that what I have said can be proved and that my examples are genuine. Produce the law for them.
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The Law of the Spartans See what an admirable law this is, gentlemen, and how expedient it would be for other peoples too besides the Spartans. The fear of one’s own community is a strong thing and will compel men to face danger against an enemy; no one will forsake his country in times of peril when he sees that a traitor is punished with death. No one will turn coward when his city needs him, if he knows that the punishment in store for him is this. For death is the one fitting penalty for cowardice; since, when men know that there are two alternative dangers of which they must face one, they will choose to meet the enemy far rather than stand out against the law and their fellow citizens.
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Leocrates is much more deserving of death than deserters from the army. They return to the city ready to defend it or to meet disaster in company with their fellow citizens, while he fled from his country and provided for his own safety, not daring to protect his hearth and home. He alone of men has betrayed even the natural ties of kinship and blood which the unthinking beasts themselves hold dearest and most sacred.
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Birds at least, which by nature are best fitted for a swift escape, can be seen accepting death in defence of their brood. Hence the words of the old poets:
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Nor does the wild fowl let another’s brood
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Be laid within the nest that she has built.
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unknown
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But the cowardice of Leocrates has so passed all bounds that he left his country to the enemy.
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That is why no city let him reside within it as an alien. He was naturally expelled more quickly than a murderer. Exiles for murder who move into another city do not meet with enmity among their hosts; but what city could admit Leocrates? One who refused to help his own country would indeed be likely to face danger for another’s! Such men are bad, whether as citizens, guests, or personal friends; for they will enjoy the advantages offered by the state but will not consent to assist it too, in times of difficulty.
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Consider: he is hated and expelled by those without a reason to resent him; what treatment should he get from you who have had the utmost provocation? Should it not be the extreme penalty? Indeed, gentlemen, if there were any punishment worse than death, Leocrates of all the traitors that have ever been would most deserve to undergo it. For other traitors are punished, though, when they are caught, their crime has yet to be committed. The defendant, alone of all men, by deserting the city, has, at the time of his trial, accomplished what he undertook to do.
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I am amazed at the advocates who are going to defend him. Whatever justification, I wonder, will they find for his acquittal? Will it be his friendship with themselves? In my own view they are not entitled to indulgence but deserve to die for daring to be intimate with him. Though their attitude was not obvious, before Leocrates acted as he did, it is clear to everyone now, since they maintain their friendship with him, that they uphold the same principles as he does and should therefore far rather be required to plead their own defence than be allowed to win your pardon for him.
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I believe myself that if the dead really do have any knowledge of earthly affairs, his own father, now no more, would be a sterner judge than any other; since he it was whose bronze statue Leocrates left behind him in the temple of Zeus the Savior, abandoned to the enemy for them to steal or mutilate. He turned that statue, which his father erected as a memorial of his own uprightness, into an object of reproach, since it commemorates a man now famed as father of a son like this.
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It is with this in mind, gentlemen, that many have approached me and asked why I did not include in the indictment the charge that he had betrayed his father’s statue, dedicated in the temple of Zeus the Savior. Gentlemen, I fully realized that this offence called for the most severe punishment, but I did not think it right, when prosecuting the defendant for treason, to add the name of Zeus the Savior to the bill of indictment.
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What astounds me most of all is, that though you are dealing with men who have no ties of blood or friendship with him but who always champion defendants for a fee, you do not realize that they deserve to feel your anger in its fullest violence. If they and their kind defend the criminals it is proof that they would associate themselves with the actual crimes. It is to defend you, in the interests of democracy and law, not to oppose you, that a speaker should have acquired his skill.
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Some of them indeed are no longer using arguments to try to deceive you; they will even cite their own public services in favor of the defendants. These I particularly resent. For having performed the services for the advancement of their own families, they are now asking you for public token of thanks. Horsebreeding,
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a handsome payment for a chorus, and other expensive gestures, do not entitle a man to any such recognition from you, since for these acts he alone is crowned, conferring no benefit on others. To earn your gratitude he must, instead, have been distinguished as a trierarch, or built walls to protect his city, or subscribed generously from his own property for the public safety. These are services to the state:
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they affect the welfare of you all and prove the loyalty of the donors, while the others are evidence of nothing but the wealth of those who have spent the money. I do not believe that anyone has done the city so great a service that he can claim the acquittal of traitors as a special privilege for himself; nor do I believe that anyone, with ambitions for the city’s honor, is so unthinking as to help Leocrates, by whom he, first and foremost, had those ambitions frustrated; unless indeed such people have interests other than their country’s.
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Though it may not be customary at any other time for members of the jury to set their wives and children beside them in the court, at least in a trial for treason this practice ought to have been sanctioned, so as to bring into full view all those who shared in the danger, as a reminder that they had not been thought deserving of the pity which is their universal right, and make the jury reach a sterner verdict on the man who wronged them. Since, however, custom and tradition have not sanctioned this and you must act on their behalf, at least avenge yourselves upon Leocrates by putting him to death, and so report to your own wives and children that when you had their betrayer in your power you took vengeance upon him.
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It is an outrageous scandal for Leocrates to think that he, the runaway, should take his place in the city of those who stood their ground, the deserter among men who fought in battle, the one who left his post among those who saved their country; it is outrageous that he is returnIng to have access to your cults and sacrifices, to your market, your laws and constitution, when to save these from destruction a thousand of your citizens fell at Chaeronea and received public burial from the city. Yet Leocrates, on his way back to Athens, even braved the epitaphs engraved on their memorials, shamelessly presuming to exhibit himself, in the way he does, before the eyes of those who mourn their loss.
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He will shortly beg you to hear him plead his defence according to the laws. Ask him what laws. The ones he deserted in his flight. He will beg you to let him live within the walls of his native city. Which walls? Those which he, alone of Athenians, did not help to defend. He will call on the gods to save him from danger. Who are they? Are they not the gods whose temples, altars and precincts he betrayed? He will beg and pray you to pity him. To whom is this prayer addressed if not to men who made a contribution to safety which he had not the courage to make? Let him make his plea to the Rhodians, since he thought their city safer than his own country.
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Would any men, no matter what their age, be justified in pitying him? Take the older generation. He did his best to deny them so much as a safe old age or even a grave in the free soil of their native land. What of the younger men? Would any of them, remembering their contemporaries, comrades in arms at Chaeronea who shared the same dangers, absolve the man who has betrayed the graves they lie in? Would they, in the same vote, denounce as mad those who died for freedom and let Leocrates who deserted his country go unpunished as a sane man?
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By such means you will grant to all who wish it the power to injure the state and yourselves whether by word or deed. This is no simple matter of an exile’s coming back; the deserter of his city, who condemned himself to banishment and lived for more than five or six years in Megara with a sponsor, is now at large in Attica and in the city. It means that one who openly gave his vote for abandoning Attica to be a sheep-walk is in this country resident among you.
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Before I leave the platform I want to add a few remarks and to read you the decree relating to piety which the people drew up. It has a message for you who are on the point of giving your verdict. Please read it. Decree My part consists in exposing one who is doing away with all these principles, to you who are empowered to chastise him it remains for you, as a service to yourselves and Heaven, to take vengeance on Leocrates. For while crimes remain untried the guilt rests with those who committed them, but once the trial has taken place it falls on all who did not mete out justice. Do not forget, gentlemen, that each of you now, though giving his vote in secret, will openly proclaim his attitude to the gods.
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I believe, gentlemen, that all the greatest and most atrocious crimes are today included within the scope of your single verdict; for Leocrates can be shown to have committed them all. He is guilty of treason, since he left the city and surrendered it to the enemy; guilty of overthrowing the democracy, because he did not face the danger which is the price of freedom; guilty of impiety, because he has done all in his power to have the sacred precincts ravaged and the temples destroyed. He is guilty too of injuring his forbears, for he effaced their memorials and deprived them of their rites, and guilty of desertion and refusal to serve, since he did not submit his person to the leaders for enrollment.
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Shall this man then find someone to acquit him or pardon his deliberate misdeeds? Who is so senseless as to choose to save Leocrates at the cost of leaving his own security at the mercy of men who wish to be deserters, to choose to pity him at the cost of being killed himself without pity by his enemies, or to grant a favor to the betrayer of his country and so expose himself to the vengeance of the gods?
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My task has been to assist my country, its temples and its laws. I have conducted the trial rightly and justly without slandering the private life of the defendant or digressing from the subject of my indictment. It is now for each of you to reflect that the absolver of Leocrates condemns his country to death and slavery, that of the two caskets before you one stands for treason and the other for deliverance, that the votes cast into one are given for the destruction of your country and the rest for safety and prosperity in Athens.
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If you acquit Leocrates, you will vote for the betrayal of the city, of its temples and its fleet. But if you kill him, you will be encouraging others to preserve your country with its revenues and its prosperity. Imagine then, Athenians, that the country and its trees are appealing to you, that the harbors, dockyards and walls of the city are begging you for protection, yes, and the temples and sanctuaries too. Bear in mind the charges brought and make of Leocrates a proof that with you tears and compassion have not more weight than the salvation of the laws and people.