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Read about the evidence
Libanius (Lib. Arg. Orat. Dem.).
 
Plot on a Map
Caria.
Naucratis.
Athens.

(1) Diodorus is also the plaintiff here.²³ He is denouncing a very humane law, so he tries to do so on the basis of the motives and intentions of the man who proposed it. (2) Timocrates’ law is as follows: If an additional penalty of imprisonment has been assessed against any Athenian for a public debt, or is so assessed in the future, he may be released from prison, if he or another man acting on his behalf establishes sureties that the debt will be paid within the stated time, and if the people approves the sureties. But if the debt is not paid on time, the man so covered by the sureties is to be jailed, while the estate of anyone who has given sureties for him is to become public property. (3) The plaintiff charges that this law has not been proposed on behalf of the common good, but on behalf of Androtion, Glaucetus, and Melanopus. For when these men (he says) were sent to Caria as ambassadors and were sailing along in a trireme, they came upon some merchant men of Naucratis and took their cargo. Then the Naucratian merchants came to Athens and supplicated the people, but the people knew that the cargo was to be used for military purposes and must not be returned to them. (4) When this happened, Archebius and Lysitheides, the trierarchs of the ship on which Androtion’s group was sailing, took the cargo for themselves. (5) But when they appeared not to have it, the ambassadors admitted that they had it, and they had to turn it over immediately or else become subject to the laws governing public debtors—it was for this reason, he says, that Timocrates made this law to help those men. (6) Timocrates, however, says that Androtion’s group has paid for the goods in full and so it is obvious that he was not introducing the law because of them. (7) But Diodorus also denounces the law in another way. For he censures the fact that it was proposed contrary to the laws; he says that it is quite unlike their ancient laws; and he shows that it is inexpedient for the state.

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— Notes —

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