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So, if anyone among you feels pity for those who lost their lives in the sea-fight, or is ashamed for those who were enslaved by the enemy, or resents the destruction of the walls, or hates the Lacedaemonians, or feels anger against the Thirty, he should hold this man’s father responsible for all these things, and reflect that it was Alcibiades, his great-grand-father, and Megacles, his father’s grandfather on the mother’s side, whom your ancestors ostracized,The famous Alcibiades was the son of Cleinias (son of Alcibiades, opponent of the Peisistratids, 510 b.c.), and Deinomache (daughter of Megacles, supporter of the Peisistratid party, 486 b.c.). The people once a year could vote for the expulsion of one citizen from the city, by writing his name on a potsherd (ὄστρακον). both of them twice, and that the older among you have condemned his father to death.
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Wherefore you ought now to condemn this man as one whom you have judged to be a hereditary enemy of the city, and to set neither pity nor forgiveness nor any favour above the established laws and the oaths that you have sworn.
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And you should ask yourselves, gentlemen, what reason you could have for sparing such men as these. Is it because, unfortunate though their public career has been, they are otherwise orderly persons, who have lived sober lives? Have not most of them been prostitutes, while some have lain with their sisters, and others have had children by their daughters;
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others, again, have performed Mysteries, mutilated the Hermae, and committed profanity against all the gods and offences against the whole city, showing injustice and illegality alike in their public treatment of their fellow-men and in their behavior to each other, refraining from no audacity, and unversed in no outrageous practice? Indeed, there is nothing that they have been spared, or have spared. For their propensity is to be ashamed of what is honorable, and to glory in what is base.
