Against Aristocrates (36-40)

How could a man be convicted of a more clearly unconstitutional proposal, or of drafting a resolution more outrageously than in this fashion? You had two phrases at your disposal: if any man kill, directed against a person under accusation, and if any man be a murderer, directed against a culprit found guilty; yet in your description you adopted the expression that applies to a man accused, while you propose for untried culprits a penalty which the law does not permit even after conviction. You have eliminated the intermediate process, for between accusation and conviction comes a trial.—There is not a word about trial in the decree proposed by the defendant.

Read the statutes that come next in order.

Statute

If any man shall kill a murderer, or shall cause him to be killed, so long as the murderer absents himself from the frontier-market, the games, and the Amphictyonic sacrifices, he shall be liable to the same penalty as if he killed an Athenian citizen;and the Criminal Court shall adjudicate.

You must be informed, men of Athens, of the intention with which the legislator enacted this statute. You will find that all his provisions were cautious and agreeable to the spirit of the law.

If any man, he says, shall kill a murderer, or shall cause him to be killed, so long as he absents himself from the frontier-market, the games, and the Amphictyonic sacrifices, he shall be liable to the same penalty as if he killed an Athenian citizen; and the Criminal Court shall adjudicate. What does this mean? In his opinion it was just that, if a man who had gone into exile, when convicted on a charge of murder, should make good his flight and escape, he should be excluded from the country of the murdered man; but that it was not righteous to put him to death anywhere and everywhere. His view was that, if we put to death people who have gone into exile elsewhere, others will put to death people who have come into exile here;

and that, in that event, the only chance of salvation left for all those who are unfortunate will be destroyed, that is to say, the power of migrating from the country of those whom they have injured to a country where no one has been wronged by them, and there dwelling in security. To avert that misfortune, and to prevent an endless succession of retributions, he wrote: if any man kill a murderer, so long as he absents himself from the frontier-market,—meaning thereby the confines of the man’s own country. It was there, I suppose, that in old times borderers of our own and neighboring countries used to forgather; and so he speaks of a frontier-market.

Or take the words, from Amphictyonic sacrifices. Why did he also exclude the murderer from them? He debars the offender from everything in which the deceased used to participate in his lifetime; first from his own country and from all things therein, whether permitted or sacred, assigning the frontier-market as the boundary from which he declares him excluded; and secondly from the observances at Amphictyonic assemblies, because the deceased, if a Hellene, also took part therein. And from the games,—why from the games? Because the athletic contests of Hellas are open to all men,—the sufferer was concerned in them because everybody was concerned in them; therefore the murderer must absent himself.