That this is so, you surely see for yourselves with regard to the present, and you need no evidence of mine, but that it was the opposite in the days of old I will prove, not in my own words, but by the written record of your ancestors, which they engraved on a bronze pillar and set up in the Acropolis. It was not for their own use, for without these documents their instinct was right; but it was that you might have these examples to remind you that such cases ought to be regarded seriously.

Arthmius of Zelea, it says, son of Pythonax, outlaw and enemy of the people of Athens and of their allies, himself and his family. Then is recorded the reason for this punishment: because he conveyed the gold of the Medes to the Peloponnese. So runs the inscription.

I earnestly implore you to consider what was the intention of the Athenians who did this thing, or what was their proud claim. They proscribed as their enemy and the enemy of their allies, disfranchising him and his family, a man of Zelea, one Arthmius, a slave of the Great King (for Zelea is in Asia), because in the service of his master he conveyed gold, not to Athens but to the Peloponnese.The occasion of this decree, to which Demosthenes refers in Dem. 19.271, is not known. According to Plut. Them. 6 it was Themistocles who proposed it; but a schol. on Aristides names Cimon. The date in the former case would be before 471; in the latter it would be after 457, and may be connected with the mission of Megabazus to Sparta in 455, mentioned by Thuc. 1.109.

This was not outlawry as commonly understood; for what mattered it to a native of Zelea if he was to be debarred from a share in the common rights of Athenian citizens? But the statutes relating to murder provide for cases where prosecution for murder is not allowed but where it is a righteous act to slay the murderer and he shall die an outlaw, says the legislator. This simply means that anyone slaying a member of Arthmius’s family would be free from blood-guilt.