29
Here is the proof: when the Legislative Committee was in session, nobody introduced any law, good or bad, in respect of the business specified, that is, of financial provision for the Panathenian Festival, but this man Timocrates coolly and quietly proceeded to legislate about matters that lay outside the terms of the decree, and were forbidden by statute. He assumed that the date specified in the decree was more authoritative than the date prescribed by law; and, while you were all holidaymaking, and though there is a standing law that at such a time we shall do one another no wrong either in private or public life nor transact business that does not concern the Festival, he was not in the least afraid of making an exhibition of himself by doing wrong, not to this or that person, but to the whole community.
30
Yet was it not outrageous that, well knowing that the statutes which you heard read just now were still in force, well knowing also that another law declares that no decree, even though in itself constitutional, shall have higher authority than a statute, he should draft and propose to you a new law, in virtue of a decree that, as he was fully aware, had been moved in defiance of the laws?
31
Was it not atrocious that, when the State had granted to us individually security against any disagreeable or offensive treatment at that time, by declaring a religious holiday, the State itself should have obtained no such immunity from Timocrates, but, during that very holiday, should have been subjected to most grievous ill-treatment? How, indeed, could any private person ill-treat the State more gravely than by subverting the laws by which the State is administered?
