Against Androtion

Do you wish me to tell you the reason, men of Athens?

He has his share in the proceeds of certain iniquities, and he also gets his pickings from the collection of revenue. In his insatiable greed he reaps a double harvest from the State. Now it is not an easier matter to make enemies of a multitude of petty offenders than of a few big offenders; neither of course is it a more popular thing to have an eye for the sins of the many than for the sins of the few. However, the reason is what I am telling you.

If you had confessed, men of Athens, that you are a nation of slaves and not of men who claim empire over others, you would never have put up with the insults which he repeatedly offered you in the marketplace, binding and arresting aliens and citizens alike, bawling from the platform in the Assembly, calling men slaves and slave-born who were better men than himself and of better birth, and asking if the jail was built for no object. I should certainly say it was, if your father danced his way out of it, fetters and all, at the procession of the Dionysia. All his other outrages it would be impossible to relate; they are too numerous. For all of them taken together you must exact vengeance today, and make an example of him to teach the rest to behave with more restraint.

Yes, it may be said, this is the sort of man he was in his public conduct, but there are other things which he has managed with credit. On the contrary, in every respect his behavior towards his fellow-citizens has been such that the story you have heard is the least of the reasons you have for hating him. What do you wish me to mention? How he repaired the processional ornaments? How he broke up the crowns? His success as a manufacturer of saucers? Why, for those performances alone, though he had committed no other fraud on the city, it seems to me he deserves not one but three sentences of death; for he is guilty of sacrilege, of impiety, of embezzlement, of every monstrous crime.

The greater part of the speech by which he threw dust in your eyes I will leave unnoticed; but, by alleging that the leaves of the crowns were rotten with age and falling off,—as though they were violet-leaves or rose-leaves, not leaves made of gold—he persuaded you to melt them down. And then, in providing for the collection of taxes, he had put in a clause that the public accountant should attend. That was very honest of him; only every taxpayer was certain to check the accounts. But in dealing with the crowns that he was to break up, he left out that very proper regulation; one and the same man was orator, goldsmith, business manager, and auditor of accounts.

Now if you, sir, had claimed our entire confidence in all your public business, your dishonesty would not have been equally manifest; but, seeing that in the matter of the taxes you laid down the just principle that the city must trust, not you, but her own servants, and then, when you took up another job and were tampering with the consecrated plate, some of it dedicated before we were born, you forgot to provide the precaution that was taken at your own instance in respect of the tax collection, is it not perfectly clear what you were aiming at? Of course it is.

Again, men of Athens, consider those glorious and enviable inscriptions that he has obliterated for all time, and the strange and blasphemous inscriptions that he has written in their stead. You all, I suppose, used to see the words written under the circlets of the crowns: The Allies to the Athenian People for valor and righteousness, or The Allies to the Goddess of Athens, a prize of victory; or, from the several states of the alliance, Such-and-such a City to the People by whom they were delivered, or, The liberated Euboeans, for example, crown the People; or again, Conon from the sea-fight with the Lacedaemonians. Such, I say, were the inscriptions of the crowns.