overnment, or to
strength the hands of your secret foes, deserves and ought to meet with
condign punishment; but who is most capable of so doing? That you will
best discover, I think, by looking a little more closely into the past
and the present conduct of each of us. Well, then! up to the moment at
which you were formed into a senatorial body, when the magistracies were
appointed, and certain notorious 'informers' were brought to trial, we
all held the same views. But later on, when our friends yonder began
to hale respectable honest folk to prison and to death, I, on my side,
began to differ from them. From the moment when Leon of Salamis, (12)
a man of high and well-deserved reputation, was put to death, though he
had not committed the shadow of a crime, I knew that all his equals must
tremble for themselves, and, so trembling, be driven into opposition to
the new constitution. In the same way, when Niceratus, (13) the son of
Nicias, was arrested; a wealthy man, who, no more than his father, had
never done anything that could be called popular or democratic in his
life; it did not require much insight to discover that his compeers
would be converted into our foes. But to go a step further: when it
came to Antiphon (14) falling at our hands--Antiphon, who during the war
contributed two fast-sailing men-of-war out of his own resources, it was
then plain to me, that all who had ever been zealous and patriotic
must eye us with suspicion. Once more I could not help speaking out in
opposition to my colleagues when they suggested that each of us ought to
seize some one resident alien. (15) For what could be more certain
than that their death-warrant would turn the whole resident foreign
population into enemies of the constitution. I spoke out again when they
insisted on depriving the populace of their arms; it being no part of my
creed that we ought to take the strength out of the city; nor, indeed,
so far as I could see, had the Lacedaemonians stept between us and
destruction merely that we might become a handful of people, powerless
to aid them in the day of need. Had that been their object, they might
have swept us away to the last man. A few more weeks, or even days,
would have sufficed to extinguish us quietly by famine. Nor, again, can
I say that the importation of mercenary foreign guards was altogether to
my taste, when it would have been so easy for us to add to our own
body a sufficient number of fellow-citizens to