Against Timocrates

Gentlemen of the jury, I am amazed at the man’s effrontery. To think that, when he and Androtion were in office, he never had any compassion for the great body of your fellow-citizens, who were exhausted with paying income-tax, and that then when Androtion was called upon to refund money, both sacred and civil, which he had long before stolen from the State, he must needs propose a law to deprive you of the double repayment of civil, and the tenfold repayment of sacred, liabilities! Thus the whole mass of you citizens has been attacked by a man who was immediately afterwards to pretend that he had framed his law as a friend of the people.

In my view, no punishment could be too severe for a man who, when some market-clerk, or street-inspector, or judge of a local court,—some poor, unskilled man, without experience, and appointed to his office by lot,—has been found guilty of peculation at the audits, demands from him a tenfold restitution, and has no new law to propose for the relief of such delinquents, and then, when ambassadors, elected by vote of the people, men of substance, have embezzled and long retained large sums of money, the property in part of the temples, in part of the treasury, is at great pains to invent for them a way of escape from penalties ordained both by decree and by statute.