Against Meidias

Next I brought an action against Meidias for slander and gained the verdict by default, for he did not appear. He had put himself into my power by failing to pay the fine, but I did not lay hands on his property. Instead I obtained leave to bring an action for ejectment, but to this day I have never been able to commence it, such shifts and quibbles does he find to thwart me. While I think it my duty to proceed thus with caution, legally and constitutionally, Meidias, as you learn, thought fit to treat with brutal insolence not only me and mine, but also my fellow-tribesmen through me.

To prove the truth of this, please call my witnesses, so that you may know that, before obtaining legal redress for my former injuries, I have again been insulted in the way that you have heard.

The Deposition

We, Callisthenes of Sphettus, Diognetus of Thoricus, Mnesitheus of Alopece, know that Demosthenes, for whom we appear, has brought an action for ejectment against Meidias, who is now also being publicly prosecuted by him, and that eight years have now passed since that action, and that Meidias has been the cause of all the delay by repeated excuses and procrastinations.

Hear now what he has done, men of Athens, in the matter of the legal action and observe his insolent and overbearing conduct on each occasion. In that action—I mean the one in which I obtained a verdict against him—the arbitrator assigned to me was Strato of Phalerum, a man of small means and no experience, but in other respects quite a good fellow; but his appointment proved the unhappy man’s ruin—a ruin undeserved, unjust, and in every way scandalous.

This Strato, acting as arbitrator, when the appointed day arrived and all the legal delays had been exhausted—counter-pleas, demurrers, and the rest of them—and there was not a trick left, at first begged me to abandon the arbitration, and then to postpone it till the next day, and at the last, as I continued to refuse and Meidias did not appear in court, and it was getting late, he gave his decision against him.

It was now evening and growing dark. Up comes this fellow Meidias to the office of the Archons, and finds them just leaving and Strato already making his way home after having handed to them his judgement of guilty by default. This I learned from one of the bystanders. Well, at first he had the impudence to try and persuade Strato to report a judgement for the defendant instead of one for the plaintiff, and he wanted the Archons to alter the record and offered them fifty drachmas.

But finding that they resented the offer and that he could persuade neither Archons nor arbitrator, he threatened them and blackguarded them and went off and—what do you think he did? Just observe his malignity. He appealed against the arbitration but omitted the oath, thus allowing the verdict against him to be made absolute, and he was recorded as unsworn. Then, wishing to conceal his real object, he waited for the last day[*](It seems safest to follow the scholiast in this difficult passage. He explains that the arbitrators underwent their audit in the eleventh month of the year, i.e. Thargelion, though he makes the odd mistake of calling it Scirophorion. The last day of the month, called ἔνη καὶ νέα, belonged partly to the passing month and partly to the new. Strato, being off his guard, imagined that the month was over and that it was too late for complaints to be brought against him.) for appeal against the arbitrators, which falls in Thargelion or Scirophorion, a day on which some of the arbitrators turned up but others did not;

he induced the presiding arbitrator to put it to the vote contrary to all the laws, because Meidias had not appended the name of a single witness to the summons; he denounces Strato in his absence and in the absence of witnesses, and gets him struck off the roll of arbitrators and disfranchised. And so a citizen of Athens, because Meidias lost his suit by default, has been deprived of all his civic rights, and has been irrevocably disfranchised; and it is unsafe for him to bring an action against Meidias when wronged, or to act as arbitrator for him, or even, it seems, to walk the same street with him.