Against Leptines

Is it right, Athenians, to honor your benefactors? It is. Well then, is it right to allow a man to keep what has once been given him? It is. Then, to observe your oaths, act on that principle yourselves; resent the imputation that your ancestors acted otherwise; and as for those who cite such instances, alleging that your ancestors rewarded no man for great benefits received, look upon them as both knaves and dullards—knaves, because they falsely charge your ancestors with ingratitude; fools, because they do not see that were the charge proved to the hilt, it would better become them to deny than to repeat it.

Now I expect that another argument of Leptines will be that his law does not deprive the recipients of their inscriptions and their free maintenance, nor the State of the right to confer honor on those who deserve it, but that it will still be in your power to set up statues and grant maintenance and anything else you wish, except this one privilege. But with respect to the powers that he will pretend to leave to the State, I have just this to say. As soon as you take away one of the privileges you have already granted, you will shake the credit of all the rest. For how can the grant of a statue or of free maintenance be more indefeasible than that of an immunity, which you will seem to have first given and then taken away?

Further, even if this difficulty were not likely to arise, I cannot think that it is well to bring the State into this dilemma, that it must either put all citizens on an equality with its greatest benefactors, or to avoid this must treat some with ingratitude. Now as for great benefactions, it is not well that you should have many opportunities of receiving them, nor is it perhaps easy for an individual to confer them;

but the humbler duties to which one can rise in time of peace and in the civil sphere—loyalty, justice, zeal and the like—it is, in my opinion, both well and necessary that they should be rewarded. Grants ought, therefore, to be so apportioned that each man may receive from the people the exact reward that he deserves.

And then again, with regard to what he will say about leaving their honors to those who have received them, some would have a perfectly plain and straightforward answer, when they claim their right to all their rewards, because they were granted for the same service, but the others will reply that the man who says that he leaves them anything is mocking them.[*](Some have received other rewards together with immunity; the others immunity alone.) For if a man has been thought to deserve immunity and has received that from you as his sole reward, be he foreigner or citizen, what reward has he left, Leptines, if that is taken from him? None whatever! Then you have no right to rob some because you arraign the worthlessness of the others, or to rob one class of their sole reward because you say that you are going to leave the other class something.

To put it plainly, the danger is not that of doing a greater or less injustice to one member of the whole body, but that of rendering precarious the honors with which we reward men’s services, nor is immunity the main topic of my speech, but the evil precedent which this law will establish, so that there will be no security for the nation’s gifts.

Again, the most unscrupulous argument that they have framed, as they think, to persuade you to withdraw the immunities, is one which I had better explain for fear you should be their innocent dupes. They are going to claim that all such payments are religious dues, and that of course it is monstrous that anyone should be exempt from the dues of religion. For my part, I see no unfairness in such exemption, if the people have bestowed it; the really monstrous thing is the course which they propose, if that is to be their argument.