21
Witnesses Reflect, therefore, gentlemen of the jury, that when we proceed in accordance with the regulations, all the ancestral offerings are made; but when we are guided by the pillars as copied by this man, numerous rites are abolished.i.e., some of the ancestral rites are dropped because the necessary funds have to be spent on the rites that he has foisted into the code. Whereupon the sacrilegious wretch runs about saying that his transcription was piety and not parsimony, and that if you do not approve of his work you had better erase it: by this means he thinks to persuade you of his innocence. Yet in two years he has managed to spend twelve talents more than was necessary,
22
and has endeavored to mulct the State in a sum of six talents each year,—and that too when he saw her in difficulties for money, the Lacedaemonians threatening us if we failed to remit them their payments, the Boeotians taking reprisals because we could not refund two talents, and the shipping sheds and the walls falling to pieces; when he knew that the Council for the time being is not led into error if it has sufficient means for the administration, but is forced in a time of difficulty to accept impeachments, to confiscate the property of our citizens, and to be swayed by the most unprincipled of its orators!
23
You ought therefore, gentlemen, to be incensed, not with those who happen to be on the Council, but with those who reduce the State to these awful straits. And the men who seek to rob the public purse are watching closely to see how Nicomachus will fare in these proceedings. If you do not punish him, you will grant them absolute licence; but if you condemn him and award him your heaviest sentence, by the same vote you will reform the rest, and will have done justice upon this man.
