[123]
What is your view, gentlemen? Do you think that if you wish to emulate your forefathers, it is in keeping to allow Leacrates to live? When they dispatched like that one who merely betrayed with his lips a city already desolate, how ought you, whose city prospered at the time, to treat the man who did in very fact desert it? Ought you not to outdo them in severity? When they chastised so sternly those who tried to rob them of the security which the people offered,1 how ought you to treat a traitor to the people's own safety? And if they, from considerations of honor only, took vengeance on criminals in this way, how should you react when your country is at stake?
1 i.e. those who deserted to Decelea. The sense seems to demand an object for ἀποστερεῖν. Hence the proposals by Reiske and Blass to supply one.
Lycurgus. Minor Attic Orators in two volumes, 2, with an English translation by J. O. Burtt, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1962.
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