Against Timocrates (86-90)

The debtor who has given sureties, he goes on, shall be released from the penalty of imprisonment on payment to the State of the money in respect of which he gave sureties. Here again he persisted in the trick I mentioned just now; he had not forgotten it; he enacted that the man shall be released from prison on payment, not of the accruing penalty, but of the original debt.

But if at the time of the ninth presidency neither he nor his sureties shall have paid in the money, the man who gave sureties shall be imprisoned, and the property of the sureties shall be confiscated. In this final clause, you will find, he has at last become the accuser of his own iniquities in the fullest sense. He did not forbid imprisonment on the broad ground that to imprison a free citizen is something shameful or terrible; but he stole from you your chance of catching your criminal in the place where he is, and so he left to you, who are the party aggrieved, the empty name of retribution, but robbed you of the reality. Without your consent he gave a discharge to people who forcibly appropriate your money; and he was within an ace of adding a clause enabling an action at law against the juries that had imposed the penalty of imprisonment.

But of all the objectionable enactments of his law, that of which I will now speak deserves our most vehement indignation. From beginning to end it is addressed to delinquents who put in sureties; but there is neither prosecution nor penalty for the man who offers no sureties, good or bad, but simply defies you. For that man he has provided the fullest imaginable impunity. The days of grace, defined as extending to the ninth presidency, he offers to the man who has put in bail.

You will see the point by observing that he adds a clause to the effect that the property of the sureties shall be confiscated, if they do not pay the debt in full. Yes, but suppose a man has not named any sureties,—then of course there are no sureties to punish. He compels the Commissioners, men chosen for that office by lot from the ranks of the citizens, to accept sureties whenever named; but on men who defraud the commonwealth he imposes no sort of compulsion,—he treats them as benefactors, and gives them the right to choose whether they will be punished or not.

Could any conceivable statute be more unsound or more opposed to your interests? First, it enjoins the reversal of your judgements in cases long ago decided; and secondly, in cases still to be tried, while instructing sworn jurors to inflict penalties, it makes those penalties inoperative. Further, it enfranchises state-debtors who do not discharge their liabilities, and, in general, it makes an exhibition of you jurors as men whose oaths, whose penalties, whose verdicts, whose censures, whose acts, in short, are all utterly futile. For my part, I conceive that if the author of the statute had been Critias of the Thirty Tyrants, he would hardly have framed and introduced it in any other fashion than this.