Against Meidias

Therefore include all the offences in one sweeping penalty, whatever you consider just.I will first, then, adduce proofs of the outrages against myself, next of those against you. After that, Athenians, I will examine all the rest of his life and will show that he deserves not one death, but a thousand. First please take and read the deposition of the goldsmith.

The Deposition

I, Pammenes, son of Pammenes, of Erchia, have a goldsmith’s shop in the Agora, where I reside and carry on my business. When Demosthenes, for whom I am a witness, commissioned me to fashion a golden crown,[*](If this document were worth emending, we should have to read στεφάνους χρυσοῦς here and τοὺς στεφάνους below, to tally with Dem. 21.16.) and to make a gold-embroidered robe, that he might wear them at the procession in honor of Dionysus; and when I had completed them and had them ready by me, Meidias, who is being prosecuted by Demosthenes, broke into my premises by night, having also others with him, and tried to destroy the crown and the robe, and a part of them he injured, but was not able to destroy them completely, because I appeared and prevented him.

Now I have much to say also, men of Athens, about the wrongs which he inflicted on others, as I told you at the beginning of my speech, and I have made a collection of his outrageous and insulting acts, which you shall hear in a moment. The collection was indeed an easy matter, for the victims themselves applied to me.[*](There is obviously some dislocation here. The evidence of the goldsmith, which concerns the outrages specified in the προβολή, should have come, with the other depositions, after Dem. 21.18. Dem. 21.23, in its present place, with its reference to the beginning of the speech, is nonsense. It is a repetition of Dem. 21.19 and Dem. 21.20, being an introduction to a description of outrages committed against others. This part of his argument Demosthenes commences at Dem. 21.128. Goodwin, who thinks that Demosthenes intended to revise his arrangement of topics, but did not carry it out when the case was dropped, brackets Dem. 21.23 here and inserts it before Dem. 21.128.)

But before I come to that, I want to speak about the tricks by which I am told he will try to deceive you; for I think it very necessary for me to put my remarks on that subject before you, and very important for you to hear them. Why so? Because the same argument that prevents your deception will help you to cast your votes in accordance with justice and your oath. You must pay attention to this argument above all others and bear it in mind, so as to meet each separate point in his speech.

And first, it is pretty evident from his private conversation as reported to me that he will say that, if I had really suffered from him as I assert, I ought to have brought various personal suits against him, one for willful damage, arising out of the destruction of the robes and golden crowns, and another for assault, arising out of his alleged attack on my person; but that I ought most emphatically not to have brought him to a public trial and proposed a penalty or a fine which he must pay.

But of one thing I am perfectly certain, and you should be equally so-that if I had not lodged the public plaint but had brought a civil action, the opposite argument would have been used against me, that if there was any truth in my statements, I ought to have lodged a public plaint and claimed redress at the time when the offences were committed; for the chorus was a state-chorus, the apparel was being prepared entirely for a public festival, and I, the aggrieved party, was official chorus-master. Who then would dream of any other form of redress than that which the law provides against those who profane a festival?

I am sure that he would have said all that in those circumstances. For it is, I believe, the cue for the defendant, the man who has done a wrong, to try and shuffle out of the method actually adopted to bring him to punishment and to say that a different method should have been employed; but it is the duty of sensible jurymen to ignore such evasions and to chastise anyone whom they convict of an outrage.

Do not allow him to say that the law affords me a choice of personal suits or an indictment for assault. That is true; but he has to prove that he has not done what I have charged him with, or that in doing it he has not profaned the festival, for that is the ground on which I based my public plaint against him, and that is the question on which you must presently cast your votes. But if I, waiving the profit which a private suit would bring, entrust his punishment to the State, and if I have chosen this particular form of action from which I can receive no benefit myself, then surely it ought to win me your favour and not prejudice my case.

Now I know that he will also make great use of this argument: Do not deliver me into Demosthenes’ hands; do not ruin me to oblige Demosthenes. Because I am at war with him, will you ruin me? That is the sort of language that he will, I am sure, use again and again, with the object of exciting prejudice against me.

But the truth is quite otherwise. You never deliver a malefactor to his accuser; for when someone has been wronged, you do not exact the penalty in such a form as the injured party urges upon you in each case. On the contrary, laws were laid down by you before the particular offences were committed, when the future wrongdoer and his victim were equally unknown. What is the effect of these laws? They ensure for every citizen the opportunity of obtaining redress if he is wronged. Therefore when you punish a man who breaks the laws, you are not delivering him over to his accusers; you are strengthening the arm of the law in your own interests.

But surely when he says, Demosthenes was insulted, he is met by an argument that is just and impartial and in the interests of all. It was not against the individual named Demosthenes that his brutality was directed on that occasion, but also against your chorus-master; and what that implies you may realize from the following considerations.

You know of course that of the judges who sit in this court none has the name of Judge, but each has some name of his own. Therefore if a man is guilty of assault or slander against anyone of them in his private capacity, he will stand his trial on an indictment for assault or in a suit for slander; but if he assails him as judge, he will incur total disfranchisement. Why so? Because at once by the mere act he is outraging your laws, your public crown of office, and the name that belongs to the State, for Judge is not a private name but a state-title.

In the same way again, if you strike or abuse the Archon when wearing his crown, you are disfranchised; but if you assault him as a private citizen, you are liable to a private suit. Moreover, this is true not only of these officials, but of everyone to whom the State grants the inviolability of a crowned office or of any other honor. Therefore in my case also, if on any other day in the year Meidias had wronged me as a private citizen, he would have had to give me private satisfaction;

but if all his outrages are shown to have been aimed at your chorus-master during the holy days of the festival, it is right that he should face public resentment and pay a public penalty. For the chorus master was insulted as well as Demosthenes, and that is a concern of the State, as well as the fact that this occurred on the very days on which the laws expressly forbid it. When you are framing your laws, you must scrutinize their purport; but when you have passed them, you must uphold them and put them in force, for that is required by your oath and by justice as well.

You had the law—an ancient one—of damage; you had the law of battery and the law of assault. Now if it had been sufficient that those guilty at the Dionysia of any of these offences should be punished according to these laws, there would have been no need for this further law. But it was not sufficient, and the proof of this is that you made a law to protect the sanctity of the god during the Holy Month. If, then, anyone is liable both under those pre-existing laws and under this subsequent one as well as all the rest of the laws, is he for that reason to escape punishment, or should he in fairness suffer a heavier one? I think that it should be the heavier punishment.

I have been told that Meidias goes about inquiring and collecting examples of people who have at any time been assaulted, and that these people are going to give evidence and describe their experiences to you; for instance, men of Athens, the Chairman for the day who is said to have been struck by Polyzelus in your court, the judge who was lately struck when trying to rescue the flute-girl, and similar cases. He imagines that if he can point to many other victims of serious assault, you will be less indignant at the assault committed upon me!

But it seems to me, Athenians, that it would be reasonable for you to do just the reverse, since your duty is to be solicitous for the common good of all. For who of you is unaware that the reason for the frequency of these assaults is the failure to punish the offenders, and that the only way to prevent such assaults in the future is adequately to punish every offender who is caught? Therefore, if it is to your interest to deter others, those cases are an additional reason for punishing Meidias, and punishing him the more severely in proportion to their number and their seriousness; but if you want to encourage him and everybody, you must let him off.

Then again we shall find that he has not the same claim to consideration as these others. For in the first case the man who struck the judge had three excuses: he was drunk, he was in love, and he did not know what he was doing in the darkness and the night. Polyzelus again explained that owing to his ungovernable temper he had lost his head when he committed the offence; there was no hostility behind the act and no intention to insult. But Meidias cannot plead any of these excuses, for he was my enemy, and he assaulted me willfully by daylight, and not only on that, but on every occasion he has shown a deliberate intention to insult me.

And indeed I can see no comparison between my own conduct and that of those others. In the first case it will be proved that the judge took no thought or concern for you or for the laws, but was privately induced by a sum of money—I cannot say how much—to drop his action. In the same way the man who was struck by Polyzelus was privately squared, laughed in his sleeve at you and your laws, and never even prosecuted his assailant.

Such statements, then, are quite in point if one wishes to accuse those men today, but as a defence of Meidias against my indictments they are the very last pleas that should be urged. For my conduct was clean contrary to theirs. It will be proved that I never got, or tried to get, any advantage for myself, but religiously observed, and have now restored to your keeping, the task of avenging the laws, the god, and your interests. Do not then allow him to make these statements, or if he persists, do not give him credence as if his plea were just. If he finds that this is your fixed determination, he will have nothing to say, not a word.