Against Timocrates (91-95)

I think that you will easily be convinced that this law upsets the constitution, throws public business into confusion, and denudes the commonwealth of many honorable ambitions. For you cannot be unconscious that our city has often owed her safety to the warlike adventures of our navy and our land forces; and that you have frequently performed glorious achievements in the deliverance, or the chastisement, or the reconciliation, of other cities. What do I infer?

Such successes could only have been organized by the aid of those decrees and laws under which you levy contributions on some citizens, and require others to furnish war-galleys; bid some to serve in the navy, and others to perform their several duties. With that object, therefore, you impanel juries, and punish the insubordinate with imprisonment. Now mark how this gallant gentleman’s statute vitiates and makes havoc of all that business.

His clause reads, you remember: if the penalty of imprisonment has been or shall hereafter be inflicted upon any debtor, he shall, on nominating sureties on an undertaking to pay the money during the ninth presidency, be released from imprisonment. Then where are our resources? How shall any expedition be dispatched? How shall we collect ways and means, if every defaulter nominates sureties under this man’s act instead of discharging his obligation?

I presume that our reply to the Hellenic world will be: We have a law here,—the statute of Timocrates. Kindly wait till the ninth presidency; then after that we will start. No other excuse is left. And if you have to fight in self-defence, do you really think that the enemy will wait for the evasions and rogueries of every scoundrel in Athens? If our city enacts laws for her own discomfiture, laws exactly contrary to her own interests, do you think she will ever be able to play her true part in the world?

Men of Athens, we may well be satisfied if, with everything in good order, and with no such law as this, we hold advantage over our enemies, keep pace with the swift emergencies and sudden chances of warfare, and are never behindhand.—But if you, sir, distinguish yourself as the author of a law that makes havoc of everything by which our city has earned the respect and admiration of the world, is there any punishment that you do not deserve to suffer?