The Fall of the Athenian Empire-(A New History of the Peloponnesian War) Donald Kagan - (1987)

256 -THE FALL OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE
the Athenian democracy." In these circumstances, it is not surprising
that the restored democracy appointed a board of anagrapheis to draw
up and publish in an authoritative manner the laws of Solon and
Draco's law on homicide. 38 The innovative, revolutionary, sophistic,
antidemocratic ideas of the most recent past were rejected as the democrats
sought a return to the old days.
The old laws, however, had not been enough to defend the democracy
against subversion; for that, new legislation was needed. In the
first prytany of the new year, July 410, the Athenians enacted a law
proposed by a certain Demophantus to safeguard the restored democratic
constitution. It provided that anyone taking part in the destruction
of the democracy, or even holding office in a regime after its
suppression, be declared an enemy of Athens to be killed with impunity;
his possessions would become public property, a tenth going
to Athena. It further required that all Athenians take the following
oath over an unblemished sacrifice before the next festival of Dionysus:
I shall kill by word and by deed, by vote and with my own hand, if I can,
anyone who subverts the democracy at Athens, whoever holds public office
after its suppression, and whoever tries to become a tyrant or helps to install
one. And if anyone else kills such a person I will regard him as blameless
before the gods and demons as having killed an enemy of the Athenian people.
And I will sell all the property of the man who has been killed and give half
to the man who has killed him and hold nothing back. And if anyone dies
while killing such a person or attempting to kill him I shall treat him and his
children well just as if they were Harmodius and Aristogeiton [the tyrannicides
of the late sixth century who had become canonized by Athenian public
opinion] and their children. I dissolve and reject all oaths for the overthrow
of the Athenian democracy, whether in Athens, or in the camp of the army,
or anywhere else. 39
17
M. I. Finley, referring to the moment discussed here, says: "The metaphorically
ancestral constitution of the present was coalesced with the literally ancestral constitution
going back two hundred years" (The Ancestral Constitution [Cambridge, 1971],
I j).
19 Lys.Jo.z; /G 1 2 115 = GHI, 86, 11.5-6. It is sometimes said that there also was a
board of ryngrapheis, which was given the task of revising the laws, but I agree with
R. S. Stroud (Draco's Law on Homicide [Berkcley, Calif., 1968], 27-28) that the evidence
for such a board is not adequate to prove its existence. In addition to the arguments
he offers, I suggest that such a revision would have been against the spirit of a return
to tradition, which seems to me an important aspect of the democratic restoration of
410.
l9 And. I ·96--98.