Witnesses

You now know exactly what took place at the time, I for one think that I have given all the explanations necessary. However, should any of you wish to hear more or think that any point has not been dealt with satisfactorily, or should I have omitted anything, has only to rise and mention it, and I will reply to his inquiry as well. Otherwise, I will proceed to explain the legal position to you.

Admittedly, Cephisius here conformed with the law as it stands in lodging his information against me; but he is resting his case upon an old decree, moved by Isotimides,In 415 B.C. which does not concern me at all. Isotimides proposed to exclude from temples all who had committed an act of impiety and admitted their guilt. I have done neither: I have not committed any act of impiety, nor have I admitted guilt.

Further, I will prove to you that the decree in question has been repealed and is void. I shall be adopting a dangerous line of defence here, I know; if I fail to convince you, I shall myself be the sufferer, and if I succeed in convincing you, I shall have cleared my opponents.i.e. if Andocides can prove that he is protected by the amnesty, he will eo ipso create a precedent whereby his accusers will themselves be able to claim exemption from punishment for the various offences which they committed before 403. The nature of these is explained in detail later ( Andoc. 1.92 et sqq.). However, the truth shall be told.

After the loss of your fleet and the investment of AthensThe fleet was lost at Aegospotami, Sept. 405; this disaster was followed by the siege of Athens, which finally capitulated in April 404. The decree of Patrocleides was passed in the autumn of 405. you discussed ways and means of re-uniting the city. As a result you decided to reinstate those who had lost their civic rights, a resolution moved by Patrocleides. Now who were the disfranchised, and what were their different disabilities? I will explain.For the relevance of the following paragraphs see Introd. pp. 331-332.

First, state-debtors. All who had been condemned on their accounts when vacating a public office, all who had been condemned as judgement-debtors,Persons against whom judgement had been given in a civil action, but who refused (a) to pay the damages awarded to the plaintiff by the court, (b) to cede to the plaintiff property to which he had established his claim, were liable to a δίκη ἐξούλης. Such suits were common at Athens, where the machinery for ensuring that a judgement was enforced was lamentably defective. all those fined in a public action or under the summary jurisdiction of a magistrate, all who farmed taxes and then defaulted or were liable to the state as sureties for a defaulter,Tax-farmers usually formed themselves into companies headed by an ἀρχώνης who personally contracted with the state for the purchase of the right to collect a given tax. The agreed sum was not paid until the tax had been collected; and so the ἀρχώνης had to furnish sureties, who became liable if he himself defaulted. It was the practice to auction the various taxes, the highest bidder obtaining the right to farm them, cf. Andoc. 1.133. had to pay within eight Prytanies; otherwise, the sum due was doubled and the delinquent’s property distrained upon.The six classes of state-debtor here enumerated suffered disfranchisement only so long as their debt remained unpaid. They were allowed eight Prytanies (i.e. roughly nine months) in which to find the money; at the end of that time their property was distrained upon for double the original amount. Should the confiscation fail to produce the requisite sum, they remained ἄτιμοι until the balance was forthcoming.

Such was one form of disfranchisement. According to a second, delinquents lost all personal rights, but retained possession of their property. This class included all persons convicted of theft or of accepting bribes—it was laid down that both they and their descendants should lose their personal rights. Similarly, all who deserted on the field of battle, who were found guilty of evasion of military service, of cowardice, or of withholding a ship from action,When Trierarchs. all who threw away their shields, or were thrice convicted of giving perjured evidence or of falsely endorsing a summons,Whenever a plaintiff had to serve a summons in person, the law required that he should do so in the presence of witnesses. The names of these witnesses were entered on the writ. If the plaintiff secured the witnesses’ names without serving the summons and so won the case by default, the defendant had the right to bring a γραφὴ ψευδοκλητείας against the witnesses ( κλητῆρες) concerned. or who were found guilty of maltreating their parents, were deprived of their personal rights, while retaining possession of their property.

Others again had their rights curtailed in specified directions; they were only partially, not wholly, disfranchised. The soldiers who remained in Athens under the Four Hundred are a case in point.This penalty appears to have been inflicted in 410, after the restoration of the democracy. They enjoyed all the rights of ordinary citizens, except that they were forbidden to speak in the Assembly or become members of the Council. They lost their rights in these two respects, because in their case the limited disability took this particular form.

Others were deprived of the right of bringing an indictment, or of lodging an information: others of sailing up the Hellespont, or of crossing to Ionia: while yet others were specifically debarred from entering the Agora.

You enacted, then, that both the originals and all extant copies of these several decrees should be cancelled, and your differences ended by an exchange of pledges on the Acropolis. Kindly read the decree of Patrocleides whereby this was effected.The decree reinstates (a) public debtors whose names were still on the official registers in June-July 405, (b) political offenders who had suffered ἀτιμία in 410 after the downfall of the Four Hundred and the restoration of the full democracy. These include both members of the Four Hundred and their supporters. An exception is made, however, of those oligarchs who fled to Decelea (e.g. Peisander and Charicles), and of persons in exile for homicide, massacre, or attempted tyranny. The last two crimes are only mentioned because Patrocleides is here quoting from a law of Solon’s and wishes to be complete. Trials for massacre or attempted tyranny had long been unheard of. For the text of the Solonian law see Plut. Sol. 19.

Decree.—On the motion of Patrocleides: whereas the Athenians have enacted that persons disfranchised and public debtors may speak and propose measures in the Assembly with impunity, the People shall pass the decree which was passed at the time of the Persian Wars and which proved of benefit to Athens. As touching such of those registered with the Superintendents of Revenue, the Treasurers of Athena and the other Deities, or the Basileus, as had not been removed from the register before the last sitting of the Council in the archonship of Callias,Callias was Archon from 406 to 405. His year of office terminated in June-July 405, and the Decree of Patrocleides followed during the autumn.:

all who before that date had been disfranchised as debtors: or had been found guilty of maladministration by the Auditors and their assessors at the Auditors’ offices: or had been indicted for maladministration, but had not as yet been publicly tried: or 〈had been condemned to suffer〉 specific disabilities: or had been condemned as sureties for a defaulter; and all who were recorded as members of the Four Hundred: or who had recorded against them any act performed under the oligarchy—alway excepting those publicly recorded as fugitives: those who have been tried for homicide by the Areopagus, or by the Ephetae, whether sitting at the Pryaneum or the Delphinium, under the Presidency of the Basileus, and are now in exile or under sentence of deathThe Areopagus tried cases of wilful murder. The fifty-one Ephetae sat in different courts according to the nature of the offence which they were trying, but always in the open air for religious reasons. Sitting ἐπὶ Πρυτανείῳ, in the precincts of the Prytaneum, they heard cases of justifiable homicide ( φόνος δίκαιος): sitting ἐπὶ Δελφινίῳ, in the precincts of the temple of Apollo Delphinius, they heard cases of homicide where the criminal was a person or persons unknown or where death had been caused by an inanimate instrument. They further met ἐπὶ Παλλαδίῳ to try cases of φόνος ἀκούσιος and βούλευσις φόνου ἀκουσίου(cf. Antiphon, , lntrod.); and in Phreatto, a quarter of Peiraeus on the sea-shore, to try persons already in exile for homicide and charged with a second murder, committed before they quitted Attica. The accused pleaded from a boat. These last two courts are not mentioned here. See also Antiphon, , Gen. Introd.: and those guilty of massacre or attempted tyranny—

shall one and all have their names everywhere cancelled by the Superintendents of Revenue and by the Council in accordance with the foregoing, wherever any public record of their offence be found; and any copies of such records which anywhere exist shall be produced by the Thesmothetae and other magistrates. This shall be done within three days after the consent of the People has been given. And no one shall secretly retain a copy of those records which it has been decided to cancel, nor shall he at any time make malicious reference to the past. He who does so shall be liable to the punishment of fugitives from the court of the Areopagusi.e. be put to death, if he is ever apprehended within the dominions of Athens.: to the end that the Athenians may live in all security both now and hereafter.

By this decree you reinstated those who had lost their rights; but neither the proposal of Patrocleides nor your own enactment contained any reference to a restoration of exiles. However, after you had come to terms with Sparta and demolished your walls, you allowed your exiles to return too.In April, 404. The Thirty were installed by the following summer on the motion of Dracontides, which the presence of the Spartan garrison made it difficult to reject. In the winter of 404 a number of the exiled democrats under Thrasybulus seized Phyle on the northern frontier of Attica; then they moved on Peiraeus and fortified Munychia. By February 403 they were strong enough to crush the Thirty, the remnants of whom fled to Eleusis, whence they were finally extirpated in 401. Then the Thirty came into power, and there followed the occupation of Phyle and Munychia, and those terrible struggles which I am loath to recall either to myself or to you.

After your return from PeiraeusFebruary 403. you resolved to let bygones be bygones, in spite of the opportunity for revenge. You considered the safety of Athens of more importance than the settlement of private scores; so both sides, you decided, were to forget the past. Accordingly, you elected a commission of twenty to govern Athens until a fresh code of laws had been authorized; during the interval the code of Solon and the statutes of Draco were to be in force.

However, after you had chosen a Council by lot and elected Nomothetae,Further details are given in the decree which follows. The ordinary Nomothetae were chosen by lot from the Heliasts of each year to revise the existing laws and examine proposed additions. The Nomothetae here mentioned are an entirely distinct body. They were 500 in number and elected by the demes. In conjunction with the Council they were to revise the laws. It was found, however, that the anarchy of the previous year had rendered a vast number of citizens technically liable to punishment. This meant that a very extensive modification of the existing legal code was necessary. A committee was therefore selected from the 500 Nomothetae by the Council to draft a fresh body of laws. Its recommendations were to be submitted to the Council and the remaining Nomothetae for approval. In the interval the laws of Solon and the θεσμοί of Draco dealing with homicide were to be in force. you began to discover that there were not a few of the laws of Solon and Draco under which numbers of citizens were liable, owing to previous events. You therefore called a meeting of the Assembly to discuss the difficulty, and as a result enacted that the whole of the laws should be revised and that such as were approved should be inscribed the Portico.The στοὰ βασίλειος in the Agora. Kindly read the decree.