humorous description of their own besetting weakness, their restless
vanity, and inordinate love of change.

The chief advocate for mitigating the sentence against Mytilene was a
certain Diodotus, who had taken a leading part in the previous debate,
and now stood up again to oppose the blood-thirsty counsels of Cleon.
The speech of Diodotus is calm, sober, and business-like. After a
dignified remonstrance against the vile insinuations of Cleon, by whom
all who differed from him were decried as fools or knaves, Diodotus
proceeded to argue the question from the point of view of expediency.
He was not there, he said, to plead the cause of the Mytilenaeans, or
to discuss abstract questions of law and justice. What they had to
consider was what course would be most conducive to the interests of
Athens. According to Cleon, those interests would be best served by a
wholesale massacre of the inhabitants of Mytilene, which would strike
terror into the other subjects of Athens, and prevent them from
yielding to the same temptation. But, reasoned Diodotus, experience
had shown that intending criminals were not deterred from wrongdoing
by the increased severity of penal statutes. For a long time lawgivers
had framed their codes in this belief, thinking to drive mankind into
the path of rectitude by appealing to their terrors. Yet crime had not
diminished, but rather increased. And what was true of individuals,
was still more true of cities, where each man hoped to be concealed
among the crowd of transgressors. Criminals, whether they acted
singly, or in large numbers, were only rendered desperate, if all
degrees of crime were confounded in one common penalty of death.

Such were the enlightened principles of jurisprudence set forth by an
Athenian of the fifth century before Christ--principles which were
first recognised in modern Europe within the memory of men still