Against Ctesiphon (16-20)

The Laws

When, therefore, fellow citizens, what the lawgiver names offices, they call employments and commissions, it is your duty to remember the law, and to set it against their shamelessness, and to remind them that you refuse to accept a rascally sophist, who expects to destroy the laws with phrases; but that when a man has made an illegal motion, the more cleverly he talks, the more angry will he find you. For by right, fellow citizens, the orator and the law ought to speak the same language; but when the law utters one voice and the orator another, you ought to give your vote to the just demand of the law, not to the shamelessness of the speaker.

But now to the irrefutable argument, as Demosthenes calls it, I wish to reply briefly in advance. For he will say, I am in charge of the construction of walls; I admit it; but I have made a present of a hundred minas to the state, and I have carried out the work on a larger scale than was prescribed; what then is it that you want to audit? unless a man’s patriotism is to be audited! Now to this pretext hear my answer, true to the facts and beneficial to you.

In this city, so ancient and so great, no man is free from the audit who has held any public trust.

I will first cite cases where this would be least expected. For example, the law directs that priests and priestesses be subject to audit, all collectively, and each severally and individually—persons who receive perquisites only, and whose occupation is to pray to heaven for you; and they are made accountable not only separately, but whole priestly, families together, the Eumolpidae, the Ceryces, and all the rest.

Again, the law directs that the trierarchs be subject to audit, though they have had no public funds in their hands, and though they are not men who filch large sums from your treasury and pay out small ones, and not men who claim to be making donations when they are only paying back what is your own, but men who are acknowledged by all to have spent their family fortunes in their ambition to serve you.

Furthermore, not the trierarchs alone, but also the highest bodies in the state, come under the verdict of the courts of audit.

For, first, the Senate of the Areopagus is required by the law to file its accounts with the Board of Auditors and to submit to their examination; yes, even those men, who sit with solemn aspect yonder as the court of highest competence, are brought under your verdict. Shall the Senate of the Areopagus, then, receive no crown? They shall not, for such is not the tradition of our fathers. Have they, then, no love of honor? Indeed they have! They so love honor that they are not satisfied with merely keeping free from guilt, but they punish their members even for mistakes. But your politicians are pampered. Further, the lawgiver has made the Senate of Five Hundred subject to audit.