Against Conon

Speaking broadly, men of the jury, I hold it right that no man should have any excuse or immunity to rely on, when he is brought before you, so valid that he is to be permitted to commit outrage; but if allowance is to be made for anyone, it should be for those only who commit an act of this sort in the folly of youth,—it is for these, I say, that such indulgence should be reserved, and even in their case it should not extend to the remission of the penalty, but to its mitigation.

But when a man over fifty years of age in the company of younger men, and these his own sons, not only did not discourage or prevent their wantonness, but has proved himself the leader and the foremost and the vilest of all, what punishment could he suffer that would be commensurate with his deeds? For my part, I think that even death would be too mild. Why, if Conon had committed none of the acts himself, but had merely stood by while his son Ctesias did what he is himself proved to have done, you would regard him with loathing, and rightly.

For if he has trained up his sons in such fashion that they feel no fear or shame while committing in his presence crimes for some of which the punishment of death is ordained, what punishment do you think too severe for him? I think these actions are a proof that he has no reverence for his own father; for if he had honored and feared him, he would have exacted honor and fear from his own children.

(To the clerk.) Now take the statutes, that concerning assault and that concerning highway robbers. You will see that the defendant is amenable to them both. Read.

The Laws

By both these statutes, then, the defendant Conon is amenable for what he has done; for he committed both assault and highway robbery. If I on my part have not chosen to proceed against him under these statutes, that should fairly prove that I am a peaceful and inoffensive person, not that he is any the less a villain.

And, assuredly, if anything had happened to me,[*](A frequent euphemism for, if my death had ensued.) he would have been liable to a charge of murder and the severest of penalties. At any rate the father of the priestess at Brauron,[*](Brauron was a district on the eastern coast of Attica, where there was a famous shrine of Artemis. It was to this point that Orestes and Iphigeneia were said to have brought the statue of Artemis from the land of the Taurians. The facts regarding the case alluded to are unknown.) although it was admitted that he had not laid a finger on the deceased, but had merely urged the one who dealt the blow to keep on striking, was banished by the court of the Areopagus. And justly; for, if the bystanders, instead of preventing those who through the influence of drink or anger or any other cause are undertaking to act lawlessly, are themselves to urge them on, there is no hope of safety for one who falls in with lawless rascals; he may be sure that he will be maltreated until they grow weary as was the case with me.

I wish now to tell you what they sought to do at the arbitration; for from this you will perceive their utter insolence. They spun out the time till past midnight, refusing to read the depositions or to put in copies; leading to the altar one at a time our witnesses who were present and putting them on oath; writing depositions which had nothing to do with the case (for instance that Ctesias was the son of Conon by a mistress, and that he had been treated thus and so[*](If Ctesias were illegitimate, Conon could not be held responsible for his misdoings, and previous mistreatment by the plaintiff is alleged as justification of the assault made upon the latter by Ctesias.))—a course of action, men of the jury, which I assure you by the gods roused resentment and disgust in the mind of every one present; and finally they were disgusted at themselves.

Be that as it may, when they had had their fill and were tired of acting thus, they put in a challenge with a view to gaining time and preventing the boxes from being sealed, offering to deliver up certain slaves, whose names they wrote down, to be examined as to the assault. And I fancy that their defence will hinge chiefly upon this point. I think, however, that you should all note one thing—that if these men tendered the challenge in order that the inquiry by the torture should take place, and had confidence in this method of proof, they would not have tendered it when the award was now just being announced, when night had fallen and no further pretext was left them;

no, before the action had been brought, while I was lying ill and not knowing whether I should recover, and was denouncing the defendant to all who came to see me as the one who dealt the first blow and was the perpetrator of most of the maltreatment I received,—it was then, I say, that he would have come to my house without delay, bringing with him a number of witnesses; it was then that he would have offered to deliver up his slaves for the torture, and would have invited some members of the Areopagus to attend; for if I had died, the case would have come before them.

But if he was unaware of this situation, and having this proof, as he will now say, made no preparation against so serious a danger, surely when I had left my sick bed and summoned him, he would at our first meeting before the arbitrator have shown himself ready to deliver up the slaves. But he did nothing of the kind.

To prove that I am speaking the truth, and that the challenge was tendered merely for the sake of gaining time, read this deposition. It will be clear from this.

The Deposition

With regard to the examination by the torture, then, bear these facts in mind: the time when the challenge was tendered, his evasive purpose in doing this, and the first occasions, in the course of which he showed that he did not wish this test to be accorded him, and neither proposed it nor demanded it. Since, however, he was convicted on all these points before the arbitrator, just as he is now, and proved manifestly guilty of all the charges against him,

he puts into the box a false deposition, and writes at the head of it as witnesses the names of people whom I think you will know well when you hear them— Diotimus, son of Diotimus, of Icaria,[*](Icaria, a deme of the tribe Aegeïs.) Archebiades, son of Demoteles, of Halae,[*](There were two demes of this name, one on the east coast of Attica and the other on the Saronic Gulf. The former belonged to the tribe Aegeis, the latter to the tribe Cecropis.) Chaeretimus, son of Chaerimenes, of Pithus,[*](Pithus, a deme of the tribe Cecropis.) depose that they were returning from a dinner with Conon, and came upon Ariston and the son of Conon fighting in the agora, and that Conon did not strike Ariston,

—as though you would believe them off-hand, and would have no regard to the truth of the matter that, to begin with, Lysistratus and Paseas and Niceratus and Diodorus, who have expressly testified that they saw me being beaten by Conon, stripped of my cloak, and suffering all the other forms of brutal outrage I experienced—men, remember, who were unacquainted with me and who happened on the affair by chance—that these men, I say, would never in the world have consented to give testimony which they would have known to be false, if they had not seen the maltreatment which I received; and, secondly, that I myself, if I had not been thus treated by the defendant, should never have let off men who are admitted by my opponents themselves to have struck me, and have chosen to proceed first against the one who never laid a finger on me.

Why should I? No; the man who was first to strike me and from whom I suffered the greatest indignity, he it is whom I am suing, whom I abhor, and whom I am now prosecuting. My words, then, are all true and are proved to be so, whereas the defendant, if he had not brought forward these witnesses, had, I take it, not an argument to advance, but would have had silently to undergo an immediate conviction. But it stands to reason, that these men, who have been partners in his drinking bouts and have shared in many deeds of this sort, have given false testimony. If matters are to come to this pass, if once certain people shall prove shameless enough to give manifestly false testimony, and there shall be no advantage in the truth, it will be a terrible state of things.

Ah but, they will say, they are not people of that sort. I am inclined to think, however, that many of you know Diotimus and Archebiades and Chaeretimus, the grey-headed man yonder, men who by day put on sour looks and pretend to play the Spartan[*](Many men in Athens in the days of Plato and Demosthenes, as an indication of their contempt for democracy and a protest against the decay of morals, sought to imitate the Spartan severity in dress and manners. Men such as those whom the writer is here depicting would not unnaturally seek by this means to build up a spurious reputation for austerity.) and wear short cloaks and single-soled shoes, but when they get together and are by themselves leave no form of wickedness or indecency untried.

And these are their brilliant and vigorous pleas, What! Are we not to give testimony for one another? Isn’t that the way of comrades and friends? What is there that you really fear in the charges he will bring against you? Do some people say they saw him being beaten? We will testify that he wasn’t even touched by you. That his cloak was stripped off? We will testify that they had done this first to you. That his lip has been sewn up? We will say that your head or something else has been broken.

But I bring forward surgeons also as witnesses. This, men of the jury, is not the case with them, but except what is deposed by themselves they will have not a single witness against me. But Heaven knows I could not tell you how great and how reckless a readiness you may expect on their part to perpetrate anything whatever.

Now that you may know what sort of things they do as they go about—read them these depositions, and do you check the flow of the water.

The Depositions

Well then, if people break into houses and beat those who come in their way, do you suppose they would scruple to swear falsely on a scrap of paper in the interest of one another—these men who are partners in such great and such reckless malignity and villainy and impudence and outrage? For I certainly think that all these terms fit the deeds they are in the habit of doing. And yet there are other deeds of theirs more dreadful even than these, though I should be unable to find out all who have suffered from them.

The thing, however, which is the most impudent of all that he is going to do, as I hear, I think it better to warn you of in advance. For they say that he will bring his children, and, placing them by his side, will swear by them, imprecating some dread and awful curses of such a nature that a person who heard them and reported them to me was amazed. Now, men of the jury, there is no way of withstanding such audacity; for, I take it, the most honorable men and those who would be the last to tell a falsehood themselves, are most apt to be deceived by such people—not but that they ought to look at their lives and characters before believing them.

The contempt, however, which this fellow feels for all sacred things I must tell you about; for I have been forced to make inquiry. For I hear, then, men of the jury, that a certain Bacchius, who was condemned to death in your court, and Aristocrates, the man with the bad eyes, and certain others of the same stamp, and with them this man Conon, were intimates when they were youths, and bore the nickname Triballi[*](The Triballi were a wild Thracian people. Many parallels for the use of the name to denote a club of lawless youths at Athens might be cited. Sandys refers to the Mohock club of eighteenth century London.); and that these men used to devour the food set out for Hecatê[*](The witch-goddess worshipped at cross roads. Portions of victims which had served for purification were set out for her. To take and eat this food might connote extreme poverty, but suggested also an utter disregard for sacred things.) and to gather up on each occasion for their dinner with one another the testicles of the pigs which are offered for purification when the assembly convenes,[*](Young pigs were sacrificed in a ceremonial purification of the place of meeting before the people entered the ἐκκλησία(the popular assembly).) and that they thought less of swearing and perjuring themselves than of anything else in the world.

Surely Conon, a man of that sort, is not to be believed on oath; far from it indeed. No; the man who would not swear by any object which your custom does not recognize even an oath which he intended to observe, and would not even think of doing so by the lives of his children, but would suffer anything rather than that; and who, if forced to swear, will take only a customary oath, imprecating destruction upon himself, his race, and his house, is more to be believed than one who swears by his children or is ready to pass through fire.[*](The speaker is plainly contrasting his own caution in taking an oath with the recklessness shown by the defendant, but the difficulty of the passage is only partially removed by the transposition mentioned in the critical note. As to the concluding phrase, it is doubtful if an ordeal by fire is alluded to, although suggestive parallels are found in Soph. Ant. 264 and Aristoph. Lys.133) I, then, who on every account am more worthy to be believed than you, Conon, offered to take the oath here cited,[*](Cited, that is, in the following challenge.) not that through readiness to do anything whatsoever I might avoid paying the penalty for crimes which I had committed, as is the case with you, but in the interest of truth, and in order that I might not be subjected to further outrage, and as one who will not allow his case to be lost through your perjury.

(To the clerk.) Read the challenge.

The Challenge