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, Lycurgus appears to
 be the sole authority for this story. Hipparchus, a relation of the Pisistratids, was
 the first Athenian to be ostracized (cf. Aristot. Const.
 Ath. 22 and Plut. Nic. 11 ). 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.