Against Androtion

Apart from that, it seems to me that such arguments offer you a choice, whether you think you ought to hear excuses and pleas from men who have done you harm, or whether you ought to have some ships. For if you accept the defendant’s plea, it will be clear to every future Council that their business is to find you plausible excuses, not to build you ships, with the result that your money will be spent, but there will be no ships for you.

But if, as the law says and as your oath enjoins, you sternly and absolutely reject their excuses, and make it clear that you have withheld the reward because they have not built the ships, then every Council, men of Athens, will deliver to you the ships duly built, because they will see that in your eyes everything else is of less consequence than the law. Now I shall show you clearly that no other human being is responsible for the shortage of ships; for the Council, having made the law null and void, elected this treasurer themselves.[*](The treasurer should have been elected by the people; the Council, by appointing him illegally, made themselves responsible for his defalcations. The corruption of this passage is as old as Harpocration. Mss. have ἁυτῇ or ἁυτήν . With the latter and a comma after τοῦτον, editors have tried to translate ἐχειποτόνησεν voted itself guilty. Jurinus was the first to suggest αὐτὴ and to refer τοῦτον to the treasurer.)

Again, with regard to the law[*](The little that is known of this law is derived from Aeschines’ speech against TimarchusAeschin. 1) of prostitution, he tries to make out that we are insulting him and attacking him with baseless calumnies. He says too that if we believed the charges true, we ought to have faced him in the Court of the Thesmothetae, and asked a fine of a thousand drachmas if our charges had been proved false; as it is, we are trying to hoodwink you by accusations and idle abuse, and are confusing you by matters outside your jurisdiction.

But I think you ought first of all to reflect in your own minds that abuse and accusation are very far removed from proof. It is an accusation when one makes a bare statement without supplying grounds for believing it; it is proof when one at the same time demonstrates the truth of one’s statements. Those, therefore, who are proving a case must supply evidence sufficient to establish its credibility with you, or must advance reasonable arguments, or must produce witnesses. Of some facts it is impossible to put eye-witnesses in the box, but if one can establish any of these tests, you rightly consider in every case that you have a sufficient proof of the truth.

We then base our proof, not on probabilities nor on circumstantial evidence, but on a witness from whom the defendant may easily obtain satisfaction—a man who has prepared a document containing an account of the defendant’s life, and who makes himself responsible for this evidence. So that when Androtion says that this is mere abuse and accusation, reply that this is proof, but that abuse and accusation describe his own performance; and when he says that we ought to have denounced him to the Thesmothetae, reply that we intend to do so, and that we are now quite properly citing this statute.

For if we were bringing these charges against him in any other kind of trial, he could have just cause of complaint; but if the present trial is one that concerns illegal proposals, and if men who have led a life like his are forbidden by the laws to make even a legal proposal, and if we prove that he has not only made an illegal proposal but has also led an illegal life, then is it not proper to cite this law which determines his illegal status?