Against Leptines

For you must not imagine that the pillars standing there are anything else than the covenants of all that you have received or granted; and it will be made clear that Leucon observes them and is always eager to benefit you, but that you have repudiated them while they still stand; and that is a far worse offence than to pull them down[*](Both nouns being feminine plural, Demosthenes is able to fuse completely the literal and metaphorical meanings.); for when men wish to traduce our city, there will stand the pillars to witness to the truth of their words.

Now mark! Suppose Leucon sends and asks us on what charge or for what fault we have taken away his immunity; what, in the name of wonder, shall we say, or in what terms will the proposer of your reply draft it? He will say, I suppose, that some of those who obtained immunity did not deserve it!

If, then, Leucon replies to this, Yes; I dare say some of the Athenians are scoundrels, but I have not made that a reason for robbing the good citizens; on the contrary, because I think the Athenians, as a nation, are good men, I allow them all a share; will there not be more fairness in his words than in ours? To me, at least, it seems so. For it is the custom of all nations, for the sake of their benefactors, rather to include some bad men in their rewards, than to make the worthless men an excuse for withholding their rewards from those who are acknowledged to merit them.

Nay more, upon consideration, I cannot even see why anyone should not, if he wishes, challenge Leucon to an exchange of property.[*](By the legal process known as ἀντίδοσις, a citizen called upon to perform a public service, if he thought that a richer man had been unfairly passed over, could challenge him either to perform the service in his stead or to exchange properties. Demosthenes is here putting an extreme case, for it is difficult to believe that an honorary citizen like Leucon, resident elsewhere, could be called upon for a service, even though he had wealth deposited at Athens.) For there is always property of his at Athens, and by this law, if anyone tries to lay hands on it Leucon will either forfeit it or be compelled to perform public service. And it is not the question of expense that will trouble him most, but the reflection that you have robbed him of his reward.

Again then, Athenians, it is not merely necessary to consider how Leucon may be spared injustice—a man whose anxiety about his privilege would arise from a sense of honor rather than from his needs—but we must also consider whether another man, who did you service when he was prosperous, may not find that the exemption he received from you then is a matter of necessity to him now. To whom, then, do I refer? To Epicerdes of Cyrene, than whom no recipient of this honor ever deserved it better, not because his gifts were great or extraordinary, but because they came at a time when we were hard put to it to find, even among those whom we had benefited, anyone willing to remember our benefactions.

For Epicerdes, as this decree then passed in his honor declares, gave a hundred minae to our fellow-countrymen at that time prisoners in Sicily under such distressing circumstances,[*](For the horrors endured by the 7000 Athenian captives, scorched by day and frozen by night in the deep stone-quarries of Syracuse, see Thuc. 7.87.) and thus he became the chief instrument in saving them from all perishing of hunger. Afterwards, when you had rewarded him with immunity, seeing that in the war[*](The third period of the Peloponnesian War, called the Decelean War (413-404) from the Spartan fortified post at Decelea in Attica.) just before the rule of the Thirty the people were straitened for want of funds, he gave them a talent as a freewill offering.