Against Leocrates (40-44)

Free women could be seen crouching at the doors in terror inquiring for the safety of their husbands, fathers or brothers, offering a spectacle degrading to themselves and to the city. The men who had outlived their stength and were advanced in life, exempt by law from service in the field, could be seen throughout the city, now on the threshold of the grave, wretchedly scurrying with their cloaks pinned double round them.

Many sufferings were being visited upon the city; every citizen had felt misfortune at its worst; but the sight which would most surely have stirred the onlooker and moved him to tears over the sorrows of Athens was to see the people vote that slaves should be released, that aliens should become Athenians and the disfranchised regain their rights[*]: the nation that once proudly claimed to be indigenous and free. The city had suffered a change indeed.

She who used once to champion the freedom of her fellow Greeks was now content if she could safely meet the dangers that her own defence entailed. In the past she had ruled a wide extent of foreign land; now she was disputing with Macedon for her own. The people whom Lacedaemonians and Peloponnesians, whom the Greeks of Asia used once to summon to their help,[*] were now entreating men of Andros, Ceos, Troezen and Epidaurus to send them aid.

Therefore, gentlemen, if at a time of fears like these, a time of such great danger and disgrace, there was a deserter from the city, a mall who neither took up arms in his country’s defence nor submitted his person to the generals for enrollment but ran away and betrayed the safety of the people, what patriotic juryman with any scruples would vote for his acquittal? What advocate summoned into court would help a traitor to his city? He had not even the grace to share our grief at the misfortunes of his country, and he has made no contribution towards the defence of Athens and our democracy.

Yet men of every age offered their services for the city’s defence on that occasion when the land was giving up its trees, the dead their gravestones, and the temples arms. Some set themselves to building walls, others to making ditches and palisades. Not a man in the city was idle. Leocrates did not offer himself to be enrolled for a single one of these tasks.