Athenian laws

For force belongs to the few, but the laws to all alike;

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

And shall not he be punished who in contempt of all the laws thus publicly strikes the master of a chorus?

And so the name of a man whom the laws forbid to enter our temples in person because of his prostitution, has been inscribed on the cups in those temples.

Not so the defendant.

Now what is the defendant?

Would the laws be any longer valid?

On the contrary we shall find that, when once you have given an adverse verdict, all magistrates and all statesmen accept them.

Therefore, men of Athens, exhort one another to come to the rescue of the laws, and cast your votes against those who deliberately dishonor what is divine;

It is preposterous that your ancestors faced death to save the laws from destruction, but that you do not even punish those who have offended against the laws;

Ratification of Laws

otherwise they shall not be raised to the Council of Areopagus, as obstructing the rectification of the statutes.

I will therefore take his first offence first, that is, that he tried to legislate in defiance of all the statutes.

Instead, we sought redress in Macedonia under their laws and they at Athens under ours.

As for me, men of Athens, I did not venture to propose anything that was unconstitutional, but it was not so to propose the direct contrary of Philocrates’ decree, as I can prove to you.

His object, of course, is to steal a march on you, and to insert in the compact an admission on your part that none of the wrongs committed at Potidaea are charged against him by you as the injured party, but that you confirm his seizure and retention of that city as lawful.

No, against our enemies, who are not amenable to the laws, it is right and necessary to maintain troops, to send out fleets, and to raise funds;

and there are the laws, which direct us to impeach such offenders, but not, of course, to mount guard over ourselves, at such a cost and with so large a fleet;

for we may justly regard the voice, which the crier raises as the laws direct, as the civic voice of our country.

You look at contracts of everyday business in the light of relevant statutes and facts, but at questions of public policy with due regard to the proud traditions of our forefathers.

Yes, men of Athens, and you ought to insist that those who made these laws should also repeal them.

In plain language I mean the laws for administering the Theoric Fund, and also some of the service regulations.

Do not use it to frame new laws—you have laws enough for your purpose—but repeal those which hamper us in the present crisis.

I shall try and prove to you what I stated in my affidavit, namely, that the deceased did not adopt a son, that he did not bequeath his property, that he left no will, and that no one except myself has a right to the estate of Astyphilus.

For my part I cannot believe that anyone, when he was adopting a son, would have ventured to summon as witnesses any other persons except those with whom he was about to leave that son, to take his own place as an associate for the future in their religious and civic acts.

It is only reasonable to suppose that Astyphilus did not merely feel a desire to adopt a son, but also provided that whatever dispositions he made should be as effectual as possible, and that, whomsoever he adopted, that person should both possess his estate and have access to his ancestral altars and perform all the customary rites for himself after his death and for his forefathers.