Against Leptines

You hear the law, Athenians, and you understand that it enables the deserving to retain their rewards, and those who are judged otherwise to be deprived of any privilege they have unjustly secured; for the future everything is left in your hands, as is right, to grant or to withhold. Now I do not think that Leptines will deny that this law is sound and just, or, if he does, that he will be able to prove it. But perhaps he will try to lead you astray by repeating what he said before the junior archons.[*](At the ἀνάκρισις or preliminary trial.) For he alleged that the publication of this amended law was a mere trick, and that should his own law be repealed, this one would never be passed.

Now, to avoid dispute, I will not press the point that the old law of Solon, in accordance with which the junior archons have notified these amendments to you, clearly enjoins that if the law of Leptines is repealed by your vote, the alternative law shall be valid.[*](We may conjecture that the old law (that if the original statute was condemned, the amendment baecame law ipso facto) had in practice been superseded.) I will pass to another point. Leptines, in saying this, obviously admits that our law is better and fairer than his own, but bases his argument on the way in which it is to be passed.

Now, in the first place, there are many ways open to him, if he wishes, of compelling the amender to introduce his own law. In the next place, Phormio and myself and anyone else he likes to name are prepared to guarantee that we will introduce it. You know there is a law making death the penalty for anyone who breaks his promise to the Assembly or one of the Councils or law-courts. You have our guarantee, our promise. Let the archons record it, and let the matter rest in their hands.

Neither do anything that is unworthy of this court, nor, if a worthless person is found among those who enjoy the grant, let him keep it; only let each case be judged on its merits. But if Leptines shall say that that is all talk and humbug, this at any rate is not mere talk; let him bring in the amended law himself and cease to say that we will not do so. It is surely a greater honor to propose the law, stamped with your approval,[*](Demosthenes is a trifle premature here.) than this of his own devising.

It seems to me, Athenians, that Leptines—and pray, be not angry,[*](He addresses himself directly to Leptines.) for I am not going to say anything offensive about you—Leptines has either never read Solon’s laws or else does not understand them. For if Solon made a law that every man could grant his property to whomsoever he pleased, in default of legitimate offspring, not with the object of depriving the next of kin of their rights of consanguinity, but that by making the prize open to all he might excite a rivalry in doing good one to another;

and if you, on the contrary, have proposed a law that the people shall not be permitted to bestow on any man any part of what is their own, how can you be said to have read or understood the laws of Solon? You make the nation barren of would-be patriots by proclaiming unmistakably that those who benefit us shall gain nothing by it.

Again, there is another excellent law of Solon, forbidding a man to speak ill of the dead, even if he is himself defamed by the dead man’s children. You do not speak ill of our departed benefactors, Leptines; you do ill to them, when you blame one[*](i.e. of their descendants, whose demerits are no justification for cancelling a reward once given. But the Greek is not clear.) and assert that another is unworthy, though these charges have nothing to do with the dead men.[*](Or possibly, if ὦν is masculine, though the men thus charged have no connection with the dead.) Are you not very far from the intention of Solon?