In 400/399 BCE, Andocides’ On the Mysteries quoted the 410/409 oath to defend democracy, preserving its lethal language inside a restored legal order [9]. In the Agora’s courtrooms, the past spoke aloud—and bound the present.
What Happened
A decade after the Thirty’s fall, a defendant reached into the city’s scarred memory. Andocides, an orator with a tangled political past, delivered On the Mysteries in 400/399 BCE. In it, he quoted at length the Demophantos decree and the oath every citizen had been required to swear: to kill anyone who subverted the democracy, and to do so “by word and deed” [9]. The courtroom, not the Pnyx, became the theater for this recitation.
The scene is easy to picture. Jurors, seated in ranks near the Royal Stoa and timed by the steady blue‑green drip of the klepsydra, heard the words that had been set on stone a decade earlier [14]. Bronze identity tickets clinked as men shifted. The text was more than evidence; it was a reminder that the restored democracy drew on rituals and laws born of crisis.
By quoting the decree, Andocides did two things. He preserved a text that might otherwise have been lost to weathered marble. And he deployed its authority to shape his own legal fight, tying personal fate to public values. The courtroom—like the Assembly—could resonate with the city’s highest principles.
The content mattered line by line. Immunity for the killer. Mandated oath-taking. Public display. The weave of sacred and civic language. The formula anticipated, and was later echoed by, the 337/6 anti-tyranny law that declared those who killed tyrants “without guilt” (hosios) and ordered stelai set up on the Areopagos and in the Assembly [12]. Athens learned to say its safeguards out loud, then to say them again.
In the days and months around this speech, the city continued its postwar legal consolidation. The law code revision and nomothesia reforms of 403–399 had just given the courts more structured roles in lawmaking and scrutiny [18]. Andocides’ citation plugged a living oath into this refined machinery.
What the jurors heard was not only a man’s defense. It was the constitution talking to itself.
Why This Matters
Andocides’ quotation functioned as preservation and activation. It kept the Demophantos oath’s exact language in circulation and put it to work inside a judicial proceeding, showing how legal forums enacted constitutional memory [9]. This bridged the Assembly’s decrees and the courts’ verdicts.
The episode exemplifies the theme of law, oath, and stone as guardrails. Public texts and sacred promises survived by being recited and litigated—not just displayed. The courts, with their oaths and procedures, became a second sanctuary for constitutional words, anticipating later inscriptions like the 337/6 anti-tyranny law [12], [18].
In the broader narrative, Andocides’ move underscores the restored democracy’s choice to root resilience in procedure and text. After violent shocks, survival depended on law’s capacity to remember and to authorize defense. Even as Macedonian pressure loomed decades later, this culture of citation and oath gave Athenians a vocabulary for resistance and legitimacy.
For historians, the speech is a treasure: a near-verbatim window onto a lost decree, transmitted by a participant in a living court. It shows how the constitution sounded.
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