Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/401

 CHANGE' AT ATHENS UNDER PEKIKLES. 377 upon the use of that right, of free speech and initiative ,a the pubHc assembly, which belonged to every Athenian witlw^ut ex- ception,! and which was cherished by the democracy as luuch as it was condemned by oligarchical thinkers, — it was a security to the dikasts, who were called upon to apply the law to particular cases, against the perplexity of having conflicting laws quoted before them, and being obliged in their vei'dict to set aside either one or the other. In modern European governments, even the most free and constitutional, laws have been both made and ap- plied either by select persons or select assemblies, under an organization so diflferent as to put out of sight the idea of per- sonal responsibility on the proposer of a new law. Moreover, even in such assemblies, private initiative has either not existed at all, or has been of comparatively little effect, in law-making ; while in the application of laws when made, there has always been a permanent judicial body exercising an action of its own, more or less independent of the legislature, and generally inter- preting away the text of contradictory laws so as to keep up a tolerably consistent course of forensic tradition. But at Athens, the fact that the jn-oposer of a new decree, or of a new law, had induced the senate or the public assembly to pass it, was by no means supposed to cancel his personal responsibility, if the prop- osition was illegal : he had deceived the senate or the people, in deliberately keeping back from them a fact which he knew, or at least might and ought to have known. But though a full justification may thus be urged on behalf of the graphe paranomon, as originally conceived and intended, it will hardly apply to that indictment as applied afterwards in its plenary and abusive latitude. Thus ^schines indicts Ktesiphon under it for having, under certain circumstances, proposed a crown to Demosthenes. He begins by showing that the proposi- tion was illegal, — for this was the essential foundation of the indictment : he then goes on farther to demonstrate, in a splendid > The privation of this right of public speech {Tvafi^rioia) followccl on the condemnation of any citizen to the punishment called an/xia, disfranchise- ment, entire or partial (Demosthen. cont. Neaer. p. 1352, c. 9; cont. Meidi- am, p. 545, c. 27). Compare for the oligarchical sentiment, Xenophon, Eepubl. Athen. i, 9.