Against Leocrates (140-144)

they affect the welfare of you all and prove the loyalty of the donors, while the others are evidence of nothing but the wealth of those who have spent the money. I do not believe that anyone has done the city so great a service that he can claim the acquittal of traitors as a special privilege for himself; nor do I believe that anyone, with ambitions for the city’s honor, is so unthinking as to help Leocrates, by whom he, first and foremost, had those ambitions frustrated; unless indeed such people have interests other than their country’s.

Though it may not be customary at any other time for members of the jury to set their wives and children beside them in the court, at least in a trial for treason this practice ought to have been sanctioned, so as to bring into full view all those who shared in the danger, as a reminder that they had not been thought deserving of the pity which is their universal right, and make the jury reach a sterner verdict on the man who wronged them. Since, however, custom and tradition have not sanctioned this and you must act on their behalf, at least avenge yourselves upon Leocrates by putting him to death, and so report to your own wives and children that when you had their betrayer in your power you took vengeance upon him.

It is an outrageous scandal for Leocrates to think that he, the runaway, should take his place in the city of those who stood their ground, the deserter among men who fought in battle, the one who left his post among those who saved their country; it is outrageous that he is returnIng to have access to your cults and sacrifices, to your market, your laws and constitution, when to save these from destruction a thousand of your citizens fell at Chaeronea and received public burial from the city. Yet Leocrates, on his way back to Athens, even braved the epitaphs engraved on their memorials, shamelessly presuming to exhibit himself, in the way he does, before the eyes of those who mourn their loss.

He will shortly beg you to hear him plead his defence according to the laws. Ask him what laws. The ones he deserted in his flight. He will beg you to let him live within the walls of his native city. Which walls? Those which he, alone of Athenians, did not help to defend. He will call on the gods to save him from danger. Who are they? Are they not the gods whose temples, altars and precincts he betrayed? He will beg and pray you to pity him. To whom is this prayer addressed if not to men who made a contribution to safety which he had not the courage to make? Let him make his plea to the Rhodians, since he thought their city safer than his own country.

Would any men, no matter what their age, be justified in pitying him? Take the older generation. He did his best to deny them so much as a safe old age or even a grave in the free soil of their native land. What of the younger men? Would any of them, remembering their contemporaries, comrades in arms at Chaeronea who shared the same dangers, absolve the man who has betrayed the graves they lie in? Would they, in the same vote, denounce as mad those who died for freedom and let Leocrates who deserted his country go unpunished as a sane man?