Against Aristogeiton I (26-30)

if, acting on this principle, the citizen rejected at the ballot or at the election should put himself on an equality with the chosen citizen; if, in a word, neither young nor old should do his duty, but each man, banishing all discipline from life, should regard his own wish as law, as authority, as all in all—if, I say, we should act like this, could the government continue to be carried on? What? Would the laws be any longer valid? What violence, insolence and lawlessness there would be throughout the city every day! What scurrility instead of our present decency of language and behavior!

Why need one repeat that order is everywhere maintained by the laws and by obedience to the laws? You yourselves have the sole right of judging our case, though every Athenian was in the ballot and all, I am sure, wanted to be allotted to this court. Why is this? Because by lot you were chosen and then assigned to this case. Those are the instructions of the law. And then will you, who owe your presence here to the laws, allow a man, who flouts the laws by word and deed, to escape from your grasp? Will none of you show anger or bitterness at this shameless ruffian’s defiance of the laws?

Vilest of all living men! Shut out from your right of speech, not by barriers or doors which any man might break open, but by so many heavy penalties, which are registered in the temple of the Goddess, you are trying to force your way in and to approach those precincts from which the laws exclude you. Debarred by every right that holds good in Athens, by the decisions of three tribunals, by the registers of the archons and of the collectors of taxes, by the indictment for wrongful entry in which you yourself are the plaintiff, curbed, I might almost say, by chains of steel, you wriggle and force your way through all and imagine that by weaving excuses and trumping up false charges you can overturn all the principles of justice.

I will, however, by a clear and forcible example show the jury that they ought not to overlook such conduct; no, not in a single particular. Imagine for a moment that someone proposed that speakers in the Assembly should be confined to the youngest citizens, or to the richest, or to those who had performed a public service, or to some similar category. I am sure you would have him put to death for trying to overthrow the democracy. And indeed you would be justified.

Yet any one of these proposals is less dangerous than if it were proposed that speakers should belong to one of the classes to which the defendant belongs—law-breakers, jail-birds, sons of criminals put to death by the people, citizens disqualified after obtaining office by lot, public debtors, men totally disfranchised, or men who by repute and in fact are utter rascals. All these descriptions fit the defendant and apply to those who resemble him in disposition. I think, men of Athens, that he deserves death both for what he is doing now and much more, or at least no less, for what he obviously will do, if he gets the power and opportunity from you; which Heaven forfend!