85
Of course he will put forward men of straw, and by the time you have rejected them, he will be out of your reach. For if anyone demands his retention in jail for failing to produce sureties, he will reply that he has done so, and intends to do so; and then he will point to the statute of Timocrates, which bids him nominate sureties whenever he likes, but says nothing about custody in the meantime, which gives no instruction for imprisonment in case you reject the sureties, which is, in short, a sort of universal talisman for would-be evil-doers.
86
The debtor who has given sureties, he goes on, shall be released from the penalty of imprisonment on payment to the State of the money in respect of which he gave sureties. Here again he persisted in the trick I mentioned just now; he had not forgotten it; he enacted that the man shall be released from prison on payment, not of the accruing penalty, but of the original debt.
87
But if at the time of the ninth presidency neither he nor his sureties shall have paid in the money, the man who gave sureties shall be imprisoned, and the property of the sureties shall be confiscated. In this final clause, you will find, he has at last become the accuser of his own iniquities in the fullest sense. He did not forbid imprisonment on the broad ground that to imprison a free citizen is something shameful or terrible; but he stole from you your chance of catching your criminal in the place where he is, and so he left to you, who are the party aggrieved, the empty name of retribution, but robbed you of the reality. Without your consent he gave a discharge to people who forcibly appropriate your money; and he was within an ace of adding a clause enabling an action at law against the juries that had imposed the penalty of imprisonment.
