Against Leocrates (115-119)

Decree

You hear this decree, gentlemen. After it was passed your ancestors dug up the traitor’s bones and cast them out of Attica; they killed his defenders, Aristarchus and Alexicles, and even refused them burial in the country. Will you then, who have the very person who has betrayed the city alive and at the mercy of your vote, let him go unpunished?

Your ancestors inflicted the extreme penalty on men who simply lent the traitor verbal help. Will you fall so short of their example as to let go as innocent the man who abandoned the state in deed as well as word? Do not do it, gentlemen of the jury. Do not give a verdict unworthy of yourselves; for it would be both impious and contrary to your traditions. If only one such decree were recorded, we might have said that anger rather than real conviction had prompted it. But when the same punishment was meted out by them to all alike it is surely plain that our ancestors were by nature bound to make war an all such crimes.

When Hipparchus, the son of Charmus,[*] did not stand his trial for treason before the people but let the case go by default, they sentenced him to death. Then, as they did not secure his person to answer for the crime, they took down his statue from the Acropolis and, melting it down, made a pillar of it, on which they decreed that the names of sinners and traitors should be inscribed. Hipparchus himself has his name recorded on this pillar and all other traitors too.

Clerk, please take the decree which authorized the statue of Hipparchus to be taken down from the Acropolis and then the inscription at the base of the pillar with the names of the traitors later engraved upon it and read them out.

Decree and Text of Inscription on the Pillar

What is your impression of them, gentlemen? Had they the same attitude as yourselves towards wrongdoers? Or did they, by obliterating the memorial of the traitor, since they could not command his person, punish him with all the means at their disposal? The simple fact of melting down the bronze statue was not enough for them; they wished to leave to their successors a lasting memorial of their attitude to traitors.