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although to allow me to do so was to their own advantage.1 Instead, they bought the slave and put him to death, entirely on their own initiative—put the informer himself to death, without any official sanction, and without the excuse that he was guilty of the murder. They should of course have kept him in custody, or surrendered him to my friends on security, or else handed him over to the magistrates of Athens in order that his fate might be decided by a court. As it was, you sentenced him to death on your own authority and executed him, when even an allied state is denied the right of inflicting the death-penalty in such fashion without the consent of the Athenian people.2 You thought fit to let the present court decide the merits of his statements; but you pass judgement on his acts yourselves.
1 Since, if his statements were true, he would adhere to them when examined by Euxitheus, and the prosecution would be able to take advantage of the fact in court.
2 The evidence of inscriptions confirms this. Decrees regulating the relation between Athens and certain members of her confederacy have survived, from which it would seem that while the σύμμαχοι were left with a limited civil jurisdiciton of their own, criminal cases were transferred to the Athenian courts. Thus the Erythraean Decree （I.G. i2. 10 ff.） enacts that all cases of treason involving capital punishment shall be tried at Athens, the Chalcidian Decree （I.G. i2. 39） that cases arising from the εὔθυναι of a magistrate and involving exile, death, or ἀτιμία, shall likewise be tried at Athens, while the Milesian Decree （I.G. i2. 22） allows the local courts a jurisdiction extending only to cases which do not involve a penalty of more than 100 drachmas. It should be borne in mind, however, that although the trial of Euxitheus himself took place at Athens, the choice of such a forum was not necessarily determined by a similar decree transferring the criminal jurisdiction of the Mytilenean courts to Athens. Such a decree doubtless existed; but those which have survived appear to envisage only those cases in which the parties were both members of a subject-state, and it is very probable, though nowhere explicitly stated, that Herodes was not a native Lesbian, but an Athenian citizen resident in Lesbos as a cleruch. If so, there is nothing to prevent our supposing that the trial would have taken place in Athens in any event.
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