13
Well, gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the facts in detail. But Athenogenes will presently tell you that in law whatever agreements one man makes with another are binding.This law is quoted elsewhere,e.g., by Dem. 47.77. Yes, my friend, just agreements. But if they are unjust, the opposite is true: the law forbids that they be binding. I will quote the laws themselves to make this clearer to you. For you have reduced me to such a state of fear lest I shall be ruined by you and your craftiness that I have been searching the laws night and day and studying them to the neglect of everything else.
14
The first law, then, stipulates that people shall not tell lies in the market, which seems to me a most admirable provision.The first of these two laws cited by the plaintiff is mentioned also by Dem. 20.9. It was enforced by the ten agoranomoi, whose duty it was to guard against fraud in all questions of purchase. See Aristot. Ath. Pol. 51. For the second law compare Aeschin. 3.249 and Plat. Laws. 915 c. Yet you lied in the middle of the market when you made the agreement to defraud me. But if you show that you declared to me beforehand the contributions and the debts, or that you wrote in the agreement the names of those whose existence I later discovered, I have no quarrel with you; I admit that I owe the money.
