232
And while you assert that you are favorites of fortune—as indeed you are, thank heaven—will you declare by public resolution that you have been abandoned by fortune, but blessed by Demosthenes? And—strangest of all—in the same court-rooms do you disfranchise those who are convicted of receiving bribes, and then yourselves propose to crown a man who, to your own knowledge, has always been in politics for pay? If the judges at the Dionysiac festival are not honest in their award of the prize to the cyclic choruses, you punish them; but do you yourselves, who are sitting as judges, not of cyclic choruses, but of the laws and of integrity in public life, do you propose to bestow your rewards, not according to the laws, and not upon the rare and deserving, but upon the successful intriguer?
233
Furthermore, a juror who so acts will go out from the court-room responsible for having made himself weak and the politician strong. For in a democracy the private citizen is a king by virtue of the constitution and his own vote; but when he hands these over to another man, he has by his own act dethroned himself. Still further, the oath that he has sworn before taking his seat haunts him and troubles him, for it was his oath, I think, that made his act a sin; and his service is unknown to the man whom he was trying to please, for the vote is cast in secret.