The Thirty Tyrants

I suppose that your prayer would be that the state of things under the Thirty Tyrants should never recur.

But acts done and judgements delivered during the time of the Thirty Tyrants, whether in private or public suits, shall be invalid.

That our tribunals, composed under popular government of men who have taken the judicial oath, are guilty of the same iniquities as the tribunals of the Thirty Tyrants?

when the war was ended, the state was given over to the punishment of the Thirty Tyrants, of whom most were his enemies.

"Thirty tyrants," he says, "stood about Socrates, and they could not break his spirit.

for what was then the affair of the Athenians, when, after that great Peloponnesian War, those thirty men presided most unjustly over the city?

You will all say, Under the Thirty Tyrants.

you are so generous and so kind toward your fellow-men that you did not deem it right to banish from the city even the sons of the Thirty Tyrants;

The Thirty Tyrants are said to have borrowed money from the Lacedaemonians for use against the patriots in the Piraeus.

Afterwards, when you had rewarded him with immunity, seeing that in the war just before the rule of the Thirty the people were straitened for want of funds, he gave them a talent as a freewill offering.

On that occasion, men of Athens, to avoid a breach of faith, you consented to pay money to those who had injured you, but now, when you might without any expense requite your benefactors by repealing this law, will it not be strange if you prefer to break your faith?

since even that Socrates, of whom I often make mention, under the tyranny of the Thirty did everything on behalf of the people and took part in none of their crimes, but, even when sent by them after Leon of Salamis, did not obey, and reviled the tyrants outright, saying they were like wicked cowherds who, taking over cattle strong and many, make them few and feebler.

When the charge was made, the oligarchy was in power, in which the situation of the two men was as follows:

For it was the custom of those in whose hands the control of the city was, not to punish those who were guilty of offenses, but to despoil the possessors of property, and they regarded the criminals as loyal and the wealthy as inimical.

This Nicias, the plaintiff, after the Thirty Tyrants came into power and his enemies threatened to expunge his name from the number of those who were to have the rights of citizenship, and to include him in Lysander’s list, being in fear of the state of affairs, mortgaged his house, sent his slaves outside of Attica, conveyed his furniture to my house, gave in trust three talents of silver to Euth …

and while still a boy I was banished from the city by the Thirty.

Finally, when the Thirty Tyrants established their rule, while the others merely suffered exile from Athens, was he not banished from all Greece?

and finally, if, while in all other matters your actions are to be the opposite of those of the Thirty, you shall in regard to me show the same spirit as they, and if I, who then lost my fatherland in company with you, shall now be deprived of it by you.

and after the oligarchy was established, the Thirty sent for me with four others to come to the rotunda and ordered us to bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis to be put to death.

Yet Socrates, with that same countenance with which he had once alone reduced the thirty tyrants to order, entered the prison, about to strip the place itself of its disgrace;

Can you find any city more wretched than that of the Athenians was, when the Thirty Tyrants were tearing it apart?

Yet this same man Athens herself killed in prison, and the freedom that liberty had restored could not endure the freedom of the man who had safely mocked a whole band of tyrants.

Yet Socrates was there in their midst, consoling the grieving fathers, urging on those who despaired of the state, reproaching the rich who now feared their own wealth with the too-late repentance of their dangerous greed, and carrying about, for those willing to imitate him, a great model—as he walked free among thirty masters.