On the Choreutes (36-40)

The law runs that the ban comes into force as soon as anyone has a charge of murder registered against him; and if placed under it, not only should I myself have been unable to proeeed with my case, but once the party responsible for the impeachment and in possession of the facts failed to proceed, the four would gain an acquittal without difficulty, and the wrong which they had done you would go unpunished. I was not, I may say, the first against whom Philinus and his companions had employed this device; they had already done the same to Lysistratus, as you have heard for yourselves.[*]

The prosecution started by doing their utmost to register a charge at once, on the day after the burial, before the house had been purified or the proper rites performed; they had taken care to choose the very day on which the first of the other four was to be tried, to make it impossible for me to proceed against a single one of them or present the court with any of their offences.

However, the Basileus read them the law, and showed that there was not sufficient time to register a charge or issue the necessary writs[*]; so I took the originators of the plot into court, and secured a conviction in every case—and you know the amount at which the damages were fixed. No sooner, however, did my accusers here find it impossible to give the help which they had been paid to give than they approached me and my friends with a request for a reconciliation, and offered to make amends for their past errors.

I took my friends’ advice, and was formally reconciled to them on the Acropolis[*] in the presence of witnesses, who performed the ceremony near the temple of Athena. Afterwards, they met me and spoke to me in temples, in the Agora, in my house, in their own—everywhere in fact.

The crowning point was reached in the Council-chamber in front of the Council—heavens, to think of it! —when Philocrates here himself joined me on the tribune and conversed with me, his hand on my arm, addressing me by my name as I addressed him by his. No wonder that the Council was astounded to learn that I had been proclaimed under the ban by the very persons whom they had seen in my company chatting to me on the previous day.[*]