Against Meidias

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.