62
You have heard the statute, men of Athens, declaring in plain terms that whosoever, whether magistrate or private citizen, shall cause this ordinance to be frustrated or shall alter the same, shall be disfranchised with his children and his property. Do you then count this a trifling or worthless precaution taken by the author of the statute to secure its validity, and to save it from being either frustrated or altered? Yet the defendant Aristocrates, with very little regard for the lawgiver, is trying both to alter it and to frustrate it. For surely, to permit punishment outside the established tribunals and beyond the limits of the prohibited areas, or to rob people of the right of fair hearing, and make them outcasts—what is that but alteration? To draft a series of clauses, all of them exactly contradicting the provisions of the statute-book—what is that but frustration?
63
Besides the laws cited, he has violated many other statutes, which we have not put on the schedule because they are so numerous. I offer a summary statement. Take the laws which deal with courts of homicide, and which order the contending parties to summon one another, or to tender evidence, or to take their oaths, or which give them any other direction; he has violated every one of them; he has drafted this decree in contravention of them all. What other account can one give, when there is no summons, no evidence by witnesses of the fact, no oath-taking,—when the penalty follows on the heels of the accusation, and that a penalty forbidden by the laws? Yet all the proceedings I have named are in use, as ordered by statute, at five different tribunals.These five courts sat respectively on the Areopagus; at the Palladium or temple of Pallas; at the Delphinium or temple of Apollo Delphinius; in Phreatto, a part of the Peiraeus by the shore; and in the Prytaneum or city-hall of Athens.
