Against Alcibiades: For Deserting the Ranks

When his father was dead[*](404 B.C.) Archebiades, who had become his lover, obtained his release. Not long afterwards, having diced away his fortune, he took ship at White Cliff,[*](On the Propontis.) and attempted to drown his friends at sea.

Well, to relate all the offences that he has committed, gentlemen, either against the citizens, or against foreigners, or in his dealings with his own relations or with ordinary people, would be a lengthy affair; but Hipponicus assembled a number of witnesses[*](This was the only formality required for a divorce.) and put away his wife, stating that this man had been entering his house, not as her brother, but as her husband.

And after committing offences of this sort, and being guilty of such a number of monstrous and grievous crimes, he is heedless alike of the past and of the future; when he ought to have been the most orderly of citizens, so as to excuse by his own life the offences of his father, he attempts to outrage others, as though he might succeed in imparting to his neighbors some tiny share of his own store of infamies, —and that, too, when he is the son of Alcibiades,

who induced the Lacedaemoniains to fortify Decelea,[*](In Attica, 413 B.C.) who sailed to rouse the islands to revolt, who became a promoter of mischief to our city, and who marched more often in the ranks of the enemy against his native land than those of his fellow-citizens against them! For those actions it is your duty, as it is also of those who are to come after you, to take vengeance on anyone of this family who falls into your hands.

Yet it is a constant habit of his to say that it is unfair, when his father on returning home received gifts from the people,[*](In 407 B.C., when he was welcomed back to a brief popularity on the strength of his friendship with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes.) that he should find himself unjustly discredited on account of his father’s exile. But in my opinion it would be monstrous if, after depriving the father of those gifts as having been unjustly bestowed, you should acquit this man, though a wrongdoer, on the ground of good service done to the city by his father.

And then, gentlemen of the jury, besides other abundant reasons for which he ought to be convicted, there is the fact that he takes your valorous conduct as a precedent to justify his own baseness. For he has the audacity to say that Alcibiades has done nothing outrageous in marching against his native land,

since you in your exile occupied Phyle, cut down trees and assaulted the walls, and by these acts of yours, instead of bequeathing disgrace to your children, you won honor in the eyes of all the world; as though there were no difference in the deserts of men who used their exile to march in the ranks of the enemy against their country, and those who strove for their return while the Lacedaemonians held the city!