25
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.
26
Your fathers, honoringIn order to give what must be the general sense of this corrupt passage I have translated Taylor’s suggested addition of τιμῶντες before τὴν Ἀθηνᾶν and ignored the words ὁμώνυμον. But the Greek text cannot be restored with certainty. 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 Living at Megara and using as capital the money which he had withdrawn from Athens he shipped corn, bought from Cleopatra,Cleopatra, the sister of Alexander the Great, was married to Alexander of Epirus in 336 and must now have been acting as regent for her husband while he was at war in Italy. from Epirus to Leucas and from there to Corinth.
