Against Leocrates (125-129)

For they established it by decree and oath that anyone who found a person aspiring to tyranny or attempting to betray the city or overthrow the democracy should be guiltless if he killed him.[*] They thought it better that imagined culprits should perish than that they themselves should have a real experience of slavery, holding that citizens must simply live in such a manner as to avoid the very suspicion of any of these crimes. Please take the decree.

Decree

These words, gentlemen, they inscribed on the pillar, erecting it in the Council Chamber as a reminder to those who daily met in council over affairs of state what their attitude to men like this should be, and hence they swore a common oath to kill them if they saw them even contemplating such conduct. Naturally enough. For where other offences are concerned, the punishment should follow on the crime; but in cases of treason or the overthrow of a democracy it should precede it. If you let slip the moment when the criminals are contemplating some treasonable act against their country, you cannot afterwards bring them to justice for their crimes, since by then they are too powerful to be punished by those whom they have wronged.

Let this foresight, gentlemen, and these actions be the inspiration to you that they should. Remember, when you vote, the temper of your forbears, and urge each other to bring in today, before you leave the court, a verdict modelled to their pattern. You have memorials, you have examples of the punishments they meted out, embodied in the decrees concerning criminals. You have sworn in the decree of Demophantus to kill the man who betrays his country, whether by word or deed, hand or vote. I say you; for you must not think that, as heirs to the riches bequeathed by your ancestors, you can yet renounce your share in their oaths or in the pledge your fathers gave as a security to the gods, thereby enjoying the prosperity of their city.

Your city was not alone in dealing thus with traitors. The Spartans were the same. Please do not think me tedious, gentlemen, if I allude often to these men. We shall be well advised to take examples of just conduct from a city which has good laws, and so be surer that each of you will give a just verdict in keeping with his oath. The Spartans, you remember, caught their king Pausanias trying to betray Greece to the Persians. He escaped in time into the temple of the Brazen House, but they walled up the door, took off the roof and mounted guard in a circle round it, remaining at their posts until they had starved him to death

and made his punishment a proof to all that even divine assistance is not vouchsafed to traitors.[*] And it is right that it should not be; for impiety towards the gods is the first crime by which they show their wickedness, since they deprive them of their traditional cults. But I have yet to give you the best illustration of the prevailing practice at Sparta. They passed a law, covering all who refused to risk their lives for their country, which expressly stated that they should be put to death. Thus the punishment which they laid down was the very fate which traitors most fear; survival after war was to be subject to a scrutiny which might involve disgrace and death. Let me convince you that what I have said can be proved and that my examples are genuine. Produce the law for them.