Against Leocrates (35-39)

Leocrates did nothing of the sort. Though he has condemned himself as a traitor to his country, a traitor to his gods and to the laws, he will ask you when you vote to contradict his own admissions and his own evidence. How can it be right, when a man has refused a fair offer and in many other ways also has robbed himself of the means of defence, for you to let him mislead your judgement on crimes to which he has confessed?

So much for the challenge and the crime. I think you have been shown well enough, gentlemen, that that part is beyond dispute. I want now to remind you what emergencies, what great dangers the city was facing when Leocrates turned traitor to it. Please take the decree of Hyperides, clerk, and read it.

Decree

You hear the decree, gentlemen. It provided that the Council of Five Hundred should go down to the Piraeus armed, to consult for the protection of that harbor, and that it should hold itself ready to do whatever seemed to be in the people’s interest. And yet, if the men who had been exempted from military service so that they might deliberate upon the city’s affairs were then playing the part of soldiers, do you think that the alarms which had taken hold upon the city were any trivial or ordinary fears?

Yet it was then that this man Leocrates made off himself—a runaway from the city; it was then that he conveyed to safety his available property and sent back for the sacred images of his family. To such a pitch did he carry his treason that, so far as his decision went, the temples were abandoned, the posts on the wall unmanned and the town and country left deserted.

And yet in those days, gentlemen, who would not have pitied the city, even though he were not a citizen but only an alien who had lived among us in previous years? Surely there was no one whose hatred of the people or of Athens was so intense that he could have endured to see himself remain outside the army. When the defeat and consequent disaster had been reported to the people and the city was tense with alarm at the news, the people’s hope of safety had come to rest with the men of over fifty.