Against Aristogiton (21-25)

Remember that this man has caused a deal of harm and has now been caught doing wrong in circumstances which make it shameful for you, his judges, to release him unpunished. For if you do so, how are you going to vote on the other reports, Athenians? What justification will you give for having condemned those men whom you have already tried? What reason will you have, when you were clearly anxious for the council to report those who had taken the money, for failing obviously to punish the men whose names they submit?

You must not imagine that these trials are private issues concerning no one but the men reported; they are public and concern the rest of us as well. A case of bribery and treason tried before you will affect others in the future in two possible ways: either it will make them accept bribes against you unhesitatingly in the knowledge that they will not be brought to justice, or it will make them afraid to take them, since they will know that those who are caught will be punished in a manner suited to the crime.

Do you not know that now the fear of what you will do restrains those who are grasping for the money offered for use against you and often makes them turn their backs on the bribe, and that the people's decree, ordering the council to inquire about this money, has prevented even those who brought the gold into the country from admitting their action?

It was a noble decree, Athenians, a noble decree of your ancestors on this question, providing for a pillar on the Acropolis at the time when Arthmius, son of Pithonax, the Zelite, is said to have brought the gold from the Persians to corrupt the Greeks.[*] For before anyone had accepted it or given proof of his character they sentenced the man who had brought the gold to exile and banished him completely from the country. This decision, as I said, they engraved on a bronze pillar and set up on the Acropolis as a lesson for you their descendants; for they believed that the man who accepted money in any way at all had in mind the interests of the donors rather than those of the city.

His was the only case in which they added the reason why the people banished him from the city, explicitly writing on the pillar that Arthmius, son of Pithonax, the Zelite, was an enemy of the people and its allies, he and his descendants, and was exiled from Athens because he had brought the Persian gold to the Peloponnese. And yet if the people regarded the gold in the Peloponnese as a source of great danger to Greece, how can we remain unmoved at the sight of bribery in the city itself? Please attend to the inscription on the pillar.