Athenian Assembly

but when the Assembly met, and we had to address the whole body of citizens, Aeschines took the first turn of all of us.

Further, no one read the resolution to the Assembly, and the people never heard it.

Thirdly, when he has been expressly instructed what to say and what to do by resolution of the Assembly, it is his duty to conduct his business according to such instructions.

That question, he says, the chairman of the Assembly put, the people voted, and it was carried.

but he proposed in your Assembly monstrous and unconstitutional decrees, by means of which he created a job for himself and has stolen a great deal that belongs to you, putting in a clause that the Eleven should attend on him.

If you had confessed, men of Athens, that you are a nation of slaves and not of men who claim empire over others, you would never have put up with the insults which he repeatedly offered you in the marketplace, binding and arresting aliens and citizens alike, bawling from the platform in the Assembly, calling men slaves and slave-born who were better men than himself and of better birth, and askin …

they mount the platform in the Assembly, where you look to your orators to explain their policy, not to flaunt their wickedness;

Imagine for a moment that someone proposed that speakers in the Assembly should be confined to the youngest citizens, or to the richest, or to those who had performed a public service, or to some similar category.

On the contrary, it seems to me that as long as he did not come before you, the city had respite from the troubles that he caused to everyone, but since he started his harangues again, Athens is in a state of siege from the factious and unruly speeches that he delivers at every meeting of the Assembly.

But first the clerk shall read you the law which provides for the lodging of plaints in the Assembly;

I lodged a plaint in the Assembly against him as an offender in connection with the festival, not only for his assault on my person at the Dionysia, but for many other acts of violence during the whole period when I served as chorus-master.

When I offered myself to the Assembly as chorus-master for the tribe of Pandionis, he should have got up and offered himself as a rival master for his own tribe of Erechtheis he should have put himself on equal terms with me and spent his money as I was spending mine and tried in that way to wrest the victory from me;

Again, when you had removed him from his command as general because he failed to sail round the Peloponnesus, and he had been given over to the popular assembly for trial under a very heavy charge, when he was being prosecuted by Callistratus and Iphicrates, men of power both in action and in speech, and they and their fellow-pleaders so influenced your minds by their accusations against him that …

He was hard pressed on every side, his life was in extreme danger because of the gravity of the misfortunes which had befallen the state, the army in Calaureia had been broken up for want of pay, the allies around Peloponnesus were being besieged by the Lacedaemonians, Iphicrates and Callistratus were accusing him of being responsible for the present disaster, and, furthermore, those who came from …

Again, not very long ago, he once more solemnly declared in the assembly that he had not adequate provision for his old age—he, who possesses so large an estate;

For not only if someone comes forward with a well-considered plan, could you hear and accept it, but also I count it part of your good fortune that more than one speaker may be inspired with suitable suggestions on the spur of the moment, so that out of the multitude of proposals the choice of the best should not be difficult.

I wonder if any one of you in this audience watches and notes the steps by which Philip, weak at first, has grown so powerful.

When we returned from the Euboean expedition and Hierax and Stratocles, the envoys of Amphipolis, mounted this platform and bade you sail and take over their city, if we had shown the same earnestness in our own cause as in defence of the safety of Euboea, Amphipolis would have been yours at once and you would have been relieved of all your subsequent difficulties.

The position of affairs, then, if one may judge from statements repeatedly made in your Assembly, is such that the Thebans will be weakened by the refounding of Orchomenus, Thespiae and Plataea, but the Lacedaemonians will regain their power, if they get Arcadia into their hands and destroy Megalopolis.

but to take a broad view of the question and to explore the best policy, with a regard for your interests and yet without party-spirit, that is the task of men who claim to offer advice in this Assembly.

But as to the reason for this—and in Heaven’s name, when I am pleading for your best interests, allow me to speak freely—some of our politicians have been training you to be threatening and intractable in the meetings of the Assembly, but in preparing for war, careless and contemptible.

all your politicians should have trained you to be gentle and humane in the Assembly, for there you are dealing with rights that concern yourselves and your allies, but in preparing for war they should have made you threatening and intractable, because there you are pitted against your enemies and rivals.

If you deal thus with public affairs and cease to neglect them entirely, perhaps, yes, perhaps even now there may be a change for the better.

While I am well aware, Athenians, that to talk in this assembly about oneself and one’s own speeches is a very profitable practice, if one has the necessary effrontery, I feel that it is so vulgar and so offensive that, though I see the necessity, I shrink from it.

For if it had been a tragedy in the theater of Dionysus that you were watching and not a debate on the very existence of your state, you could not have shown more partiality to him and more ill-will against me.

In the first place, when Nicias, my herald, was kidnapped from my territory, you not only failed to bring the law-breakers to justice, but you kept the victim a prisoner for ten months, and the letters from me, of which he was the bearer, you read before your Assembly.

Yet violation of the rights of heralds and ambassadors is regarded by all men as an act of impiety, and by none more than by you, if I may judge from the fact that, when the Megarians arrested Anthemocritus, your Assembly went to the length of excluding them from the celebration of the mysteries, and actually erected a statue before the city gates to commemorate the outrage.

Again, your general, Callias, captured the cities on the Pagasaean Gulf, every one of them, though they were protected by treaty with you and were in alliance with me all merchants sailing to Macedonia he regarded as enemies and sold them into slavery.

For an impartial investigation, men of Athens, would trace the source of Philip’s greatness not to himself, but to this very platform.

But when I consider him attentively, I find that at the outset, when the Olynthians were anxious to consult you, but certain persons were for excluding them from our Assembly, he won our simple hearts by promising to hand over Amphipolis to us and by negotiating that secret treaty once so much talked about.

I wonder that no one here, men of Athens, can count up how many years you have been at war with Philip, and what you have been doing all that long time.

Well, it was the month of Maemacterion, and there was a long and excited debate in the Assembly, and you finally decided to launch a fleet of forty vessels manned by citizens under the age of forty-five, and to raise forty talents by a special tax.

It is for you to choose what is likely to benefit the city and all of you.

Perhaps you will say, Of course we all know that we must send an expedition, and we are willing to do so;

Many speeches are delivered, men of Athens, at almost every meeting of the Assembly, about the wrongs that Philip has been committing, ever since the conclusion of peace, not only against you but also against the other states, and all the speakers would, I am sure, admit in theory, though they do not put it in practice, that the object both of our words and deeds must be to check and chastise his arrogance;

but since some of you are in such a strange mood that, though Philip is seizing cities, and retaining many of your possessions, and inflicting injury on everybody, you tolerate some speakers who repeatedly assert in the Assembly that the real aggressors are certain of ourselves, we must be on our guard and set this matter right.

but from your deliberations you have banished it utterly.

The King as political chief is contrasted with the Popular Assembly;

The Athenian Assembly made true laws for residents on Attic territory, but the dominion of Athens over her subject cities and islands was clearly a tax-taking as distinguished from a legislating Empire.

From this embryo have sprung all the most famous legislatures of the world, the Athenian Ekklesia, the Roman Comitia, Senate and Prince, and our own Parliament, the type and parent of all the ‘collegiate sovereignties’ (as Austin would call them) of the modern world, or in other words of all governments in which sovereign power is exercised by the people or shared between the people and the King.

But I know that it is hazardous to oppose your views and that, although this is a free government, there exists no ‘freedom of speech’ except that which is enjoyed in this Assembly by the most reckless orators, who care nothing for your welfare, and in the theater by the comic poets.

on the contrary, the things which we condemn before we enter the assembly are the very things which we vote for when we are in session, and again a little later when we depart to our homes we disapprove of the things which we resolved upon here.

All those who come before you on this platform are accustomed to assert that the subjects upon which they are themselves about to advise you are most important and most worthy of serious consideration by the state.

When the Athenians heard of all these things, they were in a state of concern as to what they should do in regard to the Lacedaemonians, and by resolution of the Senate they called a meeting of the Assembly.

While the Assembly itself was trying to determine these matters, Cleiteles, a Corinthian, arose and spoke as follows:

Thereupon the Athenians shouted their approval, saying that Cleiteles had spoken to the point and fairly.

The fullers or the cobblers or the builders or the smiths or the farmers or the merchants, or the traffickers in the market-place who think of nothing but buying cheap and selling dear?

and yet you are shy of addressing men who never gave a thought to public affairs and haven’t learnt to despise you — all because you fear ridicule!

Well, don’t you think the Assembly often laughs at sound argument?