According to the popular history of the Almanac Trial,
Lincoln won an acquittal for his client by calling into question the testimony
of his client’s principle accuser. The accuser said he saw the defendant kill
the victim by the light of a moon high overhead. As the story goes, Lincoln
then produced an almanac which proved that there was no moon at all that night.
Although there is good reason to question the historical accuracy of the
popular version, courtroom heroics of this type do happen on occasion.
Possibly the earliest recorded incident of this type
occurred during the Peloponnesian War. After fighting for several years, Athens
and Sparta agreed upon a temporary truce. Instead of resting and regrouping for
the renewal of hostilities with Sparta, the Athenians decided to invade Sicily
and subjugate the city of Syracuse. They chose a brilliant but dissolute young
man by the name of Alcibiades to lead the expedition. Shortly before the
expedition was scheduled to set sail, a group of drunken young men desecrated
almost all the statues of the god Hermes in the city. This was seen as a bad
omen for the expedition unless the guilty parties were punished.
Accusers came forward to say that Alcibiades was the
ringleader of the vandals, and public sentiment against him reached a fever
pitch. Although Alcibiades was probably not above such a sacrilege, it is
highly unlikely that he would do something to jinx the very expedition he
commanded. Alcibiades wanted the charge disposed of before he sailed, while his
political enemies agitated to put the trial off until after the expedition. Alcibiades
lost his motion for a speedy trial, however, and set sail with the prospects of
being prosecuted when he returned from the war.
In his absence, the case against him collapsed because of
the poor quality of the testimony from Alcibiades’ accusers. The Greek
biographer Plutarch described the situation in the following words: “And yet there was nothing sure or
steadfast in the statements of the informers. One of them, indeed, was asked
how he recognized the faces of the Hermae-defacers, and replied, ‘By the light
of the moon.’ This vitiated the whole story, since there was no moon at all
when the deed was done.”
The populace
thirsted for vengeance, however, and a number of Alcibaides’s cronies wound up
in jail. One of them, an orator named Andocides, was convicted of the
sacrilege. The conviction rested less on shaky eyewitness testimony than on the
fact that the only statue of Hermes which had not been defaced was the one
standing in front of Andocides’s house. Modern lawyers would say that Andocides
“flipped.” Upon his conviction he agreed to name his coconspirators in return
for escaping the death penalty. Apparently he did not name Alcibiades, as no
charge was ever brought against him for desecrating the statues of Hermes.
The enemies of
Alcibiades, frustrated in their attempts to prosecute Alcibiades for a
sacrilege he did not commit, discovered a sacrilege he had committed. They
charged Alcibiades with the blasphemy, and we even have a copy of the
indictment:
Thessalus, son of Cimon, of the deme Laciadae, impeaches
Alcibiades, son of Cleinias, of the deme Scambonidae, for committing crime
against the goddesses of Eleusis, Demeter and Cora, by mimicking the mysteries
and showing them forth to his companions in his own house, wearing a robe such
as the High Priest wears when he shows forth the sacred secrets to the
initiates, and calling himself High Priest, . . . contrary to the laws and
institutions of the Eumolpidae, Heralds, and Priests of Eleusis.
Having a charge
they could prove against Alcibiades, his enemies were not content to continue
the prosecution until he returned from the war. They had Alcibiades recalled
from the fleet to stand trial for this second crime. Instead of returning to
Athens, he defected to Sparta. The
Sicilian Expedition, deprived of its most dynamic leader, failed miserably. Those
members of the expedition who managed to survive the military disaster were
sold into slavery. When the war with Sparta resumed, a weakened Athens
eventually suffered an even more disastrous defeat.
You can read the full story of the prosecution in Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades.
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