328 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE judges, the ne'er-do-weels, the swindlers, and the 'syko- phantai/ or vexatious accusers trying to win blackmail or political capital by discovering decent people's pecca- dilloes. The Athenian records are less nauseous than most, owing to the mildness of the law and the com- parative absence of atrocious crime. The most painful feature is the racking of slave-witnesses ; though even here extreme cruelty was forbidden, and any injury done to the slave, temporary or permanent, had to be paid for. Attic torture would probably have seemed child's play to the rack-masters of Rome and modern Europe. Happily also the owners seem more often than not to refuse to allow examination of this sort, even to the prejudice of their causes. All kinds of argumentative points are made in connection with the worth or worth- lessness of such evidence, and the motives of the master in allowing or refusing it. Perhaps the strangest is where a litigant demands the torture of a female slave in order to suggest that his opponent is in love with her when he refuses. But the orators have a much broader value than this. The actual words of Demosthenes, and even of Isocrates, on a political crisis, form a more definitely first-hand document than the best literary history. They give us in a palpable form the actual methods, ideals, political and moral standards of the early fourth century — or, rather, they will do so when fully worked over and understood. There are side-lights on religion, as in the case (Lysias, vii.) of the man accused of uprooting a sacred olive stump from his field, and that of Euxenippus (Hyperides, iii.) and his illegal dream. A certain hill at Oropus was alleged by some religious authority to belong to the god Asclepius, and one
