Against Leocrates (25-29)

Evidence. Agreement.

You have heard the witnesses, gentlemen. What I am now going to say will give you good reason for indignation and hatred of this man Leocrates. For he was not content simply to remove his own person and his goods. There were the sacred images of his family which his forbears established and which, in keeping with your customs and ancestral tradition, they afterwards entrusted to him. These too he had sent to Megara. He took them out of the country without a qualm at the name ancestral images or at the thought that he had uprooted them from their country and expected them to share his exile, to leave the temples and the land which they had occupied and be established in a strange and uncongenial place, as aliens to the soil and to the rites traditionally observed in Megara.

Your fathers, honoring[*] Athena as the deity to whom their land had been allotted, called their native city Athens, so that men who revered the goddess should not desert the city which bore her name. By disregarding custom, country, and sacred images Leocrates did all in his power to cause even your divine protection to be exported. Moreover, to have wronged the city on this enormous scale was not enough for him. Living at Megara and using as capital the money which he had withdrawn from Athens he shipped corn, bought from Cleopatra,[*] from Epirus to Leucas and from there to Corinth.

And yet, gentlemen, in cases of this sort your laws lay down the most severe penalties if an Athenian transports corn to any place other than your city. When therefore a man has been a traitor in war and has broken the laws in transporting corn, when he has had no regard for sacred things and none for his country or the laws, if you have him at the mercy of your vote, will you not execute him and make an example of him to others? If you do not it will show an apathy and lack of righteous indignation completely without parallel.

Consider these further proofs that my inquiry into this question has been just; for it is my opinion that in dealing with such serious crimes you must base your vote, not on conjecture, but on certainty; and that witnesses must prove their good faith before, not after, they give their evidence. I submitted to the defence a written challenge on all these points and demanded the slaves of Leocrates for torture, according to the right procedure for making challenges. Please read the challenge.

Challenge

You hear the challenge, gentlemen. By the very act of refusing to accept this Leocrates condemned himself as a traitor to his country. For whoever refuses to allow the testing of those who share his secrets has confessed that the charges of the indictment are true. Every one of you knows that in matters of dispute it is considered by far the justest and most democratic course, when there are male or female slaves, who possess the necessary information, to examine these by torture and so have facts to go upon instead of hearsay, particularly when the case concerns the public and is of vital interest to the state.[*]