7
All public trials should therefore rank as important, but particularly this present one, in which you are about to cast your vote. For when you give a verdict on a charge of illegal proposals you merely rectify one single error, and in preventing the intended measure your scope depends upon the extent to which the decree in question will harm the city. But the present case is not concerned with some trifling constitutional issue, nor yet with a moment of time; our city’s whole life is at stake, and this trial will leave a verdict to posterity to be remembered for all time.
8
So dangerous is the wrong which has been done and so far-reaching that no indictment adequate could be devised, nor have the laws defined a punishment for the crimes. What punishment would suit a man who left his country and refused to guard the temples of his fathers, who abandoned the graves of his ancestors and surrendered the whole country into the hands of the enemy? The greatest and final penalty, death, though the maximum punishment allowed by law, is too small for the crimes of Leocrates.
9
The reason why the penalty for such offences, gentlemen, has never been recorded is not that the legislators of the past were neglectful; it is that such things had not happened hitherto and were not expected to happen in the future. It is therefore most essential that you should be not merely judges of this present case but lawmakers besides. For where a crime has been defined by some law, it is easy, with that as a standard, to punish the offender. But where different offences are not specifically included in the law, being covered by a single designation, and where a man has committed crimes worse than these and is equally chargeable with them all, your verdict must be left as a precedent for your successors.
