Lysias
Translated by S. C. Todd, 2011
This is a gripping tale of murder embedded in a speech by Lysias (c. 445 BC–c. 380 BC), one of the great orators of ancient Athens. Euphiletus stands accused of killing Eratosthenes for having an affair with his wife. The defendant, the narrator of this piece, maintains that his act was justified by Athenian law, which he cites as permitting a man to kill with impunity an adulterer caught in the act with his wife. Did Euphiletus get away with the murder? Frustratingly we do not know. But it is worth noting that the murdered Eratosthenes was one of the Thirty Tyrants who subjected Athens to harsh rule after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC.
After I decided to get married, men of Athens, and brought my bride home, for a while my attitude was not to trouble her too much but not to let her do whatever she wanted either. I watched her as best I could and gave her the proper amount of attention. But from the moment my son was born, I began to have full confidence in her and placed everything in her hands, reckoning that this was the best relationship. In those early days, men of Athens, she was the best of women: a good housekeeper, thrifty, with a sharp eye on every detail. But my mother’s death was the cause of all my troubles. For it was while attending her funeral that my wife was seen by this fellow and eventually corrupted by him: he kept an eye out for the slave girl who did the shopping, put forward proposals, and seduced her.
Now before continuing, gentlemen, I need to explain something. My house has two stories, and in the part with the women’s rooms and the men’s rooms, the upper floor is the same size as the floor below. When our baby was born, his mother nursed him. To avoid her risking an accident coming down the stairs whenever he needed washing, I took over the upstairs rooms, and the women moved downstairs. Eventually we became so used to this arrangement that my wife would often leave me to go down and sleep with the baby, so that she could nurse it and stop it crying. Things went on in this way for a long time, and I never had the slightest suspicion; indeed, I was so naive that I thought my wife was the most respectable woman in Athens.
Some time later, gentlemen, I returned unexpectedly from the country. After dinner, the baby began to cry and was restless. (He was being deliberately teased by the slave girl, to make him do this, because the man was inside the house: I later found out everything.) So I told my wife to go down and feed the baby, to stop it crying. At first she refused, as if glad to see me home after so long. When I became angry and ordered her to go, she said, “You just want to stay here and have a go at the slave girl. You had a grab at her once before when you were drunk.” I laughed at this, and she got up and left. She closed the door behind her, pretending to make a joke out of it, and bolted it. I had no suspicions and thought no more of it, but gladly went to bed, since I had just returned from the country. Towards morning, she came and unlocked the door. I asked her why the doors had creaked during the night, and she claimed that the baby’s lamp had gone out, so she had to get it relit at our neighbors’. I believed this account and said no more. But I noticed, gentlemen, that she had put on makeup, even though her brother had died less than a month earlier. Even so, I did not say anything about it but left the house without replying.
After this, gentlemen, there was an interval of some time, during which I remained completely unaware of my misfortunes. But then an old woman came up to me. She had been secretly sent, or so I later discovered, by a lady whom this fellow had seduced. This woman was angry and felt cheated, because he no longer visited her as before, so she watched until she found out why. The old woman kept an eye out and approached me near my house. “Euphiletus,” she said, “please do not think that I am being a busybody by making contact with you. The man who is humiliating you and your wife is an enemy of ours as well. Get hold of your slave girl, the one who does the shopping and waits on you, and torture her: you will discover everything. It is,” she continued, “Eratosthenes of the deme Oe who is doing this. He has seduced not only your wife but many others as well. He makes a hobby of it.” She said this, gentlemen, and left. At once I became alarmed. Everything came back into my mind, and I was filled with suspicion. I remembered how I had been locked in my room, and how that night both the door of the house and the courtyard door had creaked (which had never happened before), and how I had noticed that my wife had used makeup. All these things flashed into my mind, and I was full of suspicion. I returned home, and told the slave girl to come shopping with me, but I took her to the house of one of my friends and told her that I had found out everything that was going on in my house. “So it is up to you,” I said, “to choose the fate you prefer: either to be flogged and put out to work in the mill, and never have any rest from such sufferings; or else to admit the whole truth and suffer no punishment, but instead to be forgiven for your crimes. No lies now: I want the full truth.” At first she denied it and told me to do whatever I pleased, because she knew nothing. But when I mentioned the name Eratosthenes to her and declared that this was the man who was visiting my wife, she was astonished, realizing that I knew everything. She immediately fell at my knees and made me promise she would suffer no harm. She admitted, first, how he had approached her after the funeral, and then how she had eventually acted as his messenger, and how my wife had in the end been won over, and the various ways he had entered the house, and how during the Thesmophoria,1 when I was in the country, my wife had attended the shrine with his mother. She gave me a full and accurate account of everything else that had happened. When she had finished, I said, “Make sure that nobody at all hears about this; otherwise nothing in our agreement will be binding. I want you to show me them in the act. I don’t want words; I want their actions to be clearly proved, if it is really true.” She agreed to do this.
After this there was an interval of four or five days, as I shall bring clear evidence to show. But first, I want to tell you what happened on that last day. There is a man called Sostratus, who was a close friend of mine. I happened to meet him, at sunset, on his way back from the country. I knew that if he arrived at that time, he would find none of his friends at home, so I invited him to dine with me. We returned to my house, went upstairs, and had supper. After he had had a good meal, he left, and I went to bed. Eratosthenes entered the house, gentlemen, and the slave girl woke me at once to say he was inside. I told her to take care of the doors, and going downstairs, I went out silently. I called at the houses of various friends: some I discovered were out, and others were not even in town. I gathered as many as I could find at home and came back. We collected torches from the nearest shop and made our way in; the door was open, because it had been kept ready by the slave girl. We burst open the door of the bedroom, and those of us who were first to enter saw him still lying next to my wife. The others, who came later, saw him standing on the bed naked. I struck him, gentlemen, and knocked him down. I twisted his arms behind him and tied them, and asked why he had committed this outrage against my house by entering it. He admitted his guilt, and begged and entreated me not to kill him but to accept compensation. I replied, “It is not I who will kill you, but the law of the city. You have broken that law and have had less regard for it than for your own pleasure. You have preferred to commit this crime against my wife and my children rather than behaving responsibly and obeying the laws.”
So it was, gentlemen, that this man met the fate which the laws prescribe for those who behave like that. He was not snatched from the street, nor had he taken refuge at the hearth, as my opponents claim. How could he have done so? It was inside the bedroom that he was struck, and he immediately fell down, and I tied his hands. There were so many men in the house that he could not have escaped, and he did not have a knife or a club or any other weapon with which to repel those coming at him. I am sure you realize, gentlemen, that men who commit crimes never admit that their enemies are telling the truth, but instead they themselves tell lies and use tricks to provoke their hearers to anger against the innocent.
So, first of all, please read out the law.
[LAW]
He did not dispute it, gentlemen. He admitted his guilt, he begged and pleaded not to be killed, and he was ready to pay money in compensation. But I did not accept his proposal. I reckoned that the law of the city should have greater authority; and I exacted from him the penalty that you yourselves, believing it to be just, have established for people who behave like that.
Will my witnesses to these facts please come forward.
[WITNESSES]
Read me this law also, the one from the inscribed stone on the Areopagus.2
[LAW]
You hear, gentlemen, how the court of the Areopagus (to which the ancestral right of judging homicide cases belongs, as has been reaffirmed in our own days) has expressly decreed that a man is not to be convicted of homicide if he captures an adulterer in bed with his wife and exacts this penalty from him. Indeed, the lawgiver was so convinced that this is appropriate in the case of married women that he has established the same penalty in the case of concubines, who are less valuable. Clearly if he had had a more severe penalty available in the case of married women, he would have imposed it; but in fact he was unable to find a more powerful sanction than death to use in their case, so he decided the penalty should be the same as in the case of concubines.
Read me this law as well.
[LAW]
You hear, gentlemen: if anybody indecently assaults a free man or boy, he shall pay twice the damages; if he assaults a woman (in those categories where the death sentence is applicable), he shall be liable to the same penalty. Clearly therefore, gentlemen, the lawgiver believed that those who commit rape deserve a lighter penalty than those who seduce: he condemned seducers to death, but for rapists he laid down double damages. He believed that those who act by violence are hated by the people they have assaulted, whereas those who seduce corrupt the minds of their victims in such a way that they make other people’s wives into members of their own families rather than of their husbands’. The victim’s whole household becomes the adulterer’s, and as for the children, it is unclear whose they are, the husband’s or the seducer’s. Because of this the lawgiver laid down the death penalty for them.
In my case, gentlemen, the laws have not only acquitted me of crime but have actually commanded me to exact this penalty. It is for you to decide whether the law is to be powerful or worthless. In my opinion, every city enacts its laws in order that when we are uncertain in a situation, we can go to them to see what to do, and in such cases the law commands the victims to exact this penalty. So I ask you now to reach the same verdict as the law does. If not, you will be giving adulterers such immunity that you will encourage burglars to call themselves adulterers too. They will realize that if they describe adultery as their object and claim that they have entered somebody else’s house for this purpose, nobody will dare touch them. Everyone will know that we must say good-bye to the laws on adultery and take notice only of your verdict—which is the sovereign authority over all the city’s affairs.
1 On the Thesmophoria, a women’s festival, see Story 23.
2 The Areopagus (consisting of former Archons) was the most famous Athenian homicide court.