Lysias,[181] speaking of a certain Menestratus who was a prominent informer and an accuser of citizens under the Thirty Tyrants, says that the citizens of the restored democracy ‘having arrested Menestratus in court on the ground that he was a murderer,[182] condemned him justly to death and handed him over to the public executioner, and he was cudgelled till he was dead’ (ἀπετυμπανίσθη). There is, of course, a political complication in this case. The guilt of treason was added to that of murder. Yet the procedure is similar to that which would have taken place if an ordinary murderer challenged the verdict of the Court. Plato,[183] speaking of the punishment which was decreed for a slave who had wilfully murdered a freeman, and who was condemned to death, says: ‘Let the public executioner lead him to the tomb of the deceased or to a place from which he may see the tomb, and having scourged him with as many stripes as the plaintiff (a relative of deceased) shall order, slay him if he survives the scourging.’ Even on a slave, then, who had murdered a man, the relatives could not personally execute the death sentence. Again, speaking of wilful kin-slaying, for which, in his code of laws, there is no option but death, he says[184]: ‘Let the servants (ὑπηρέται) of the judges and the rulers (ἄρχοντες) put him to death and cast him out naked to an appointed place where three roads meet, and let all the public officials (or magistrates) on behalf of the whole State carry each a stone and hurl it at the head of the corpse, and free the whole city from pollution, and, after this, carry the corpse to the civic boundaries and cast it out unburied according to law’ (τῷ νόμῳ). There is here no mention of the relatives of the slain. We must suppose that if these relatives had been the normal executioners, the kin-slayer would not ordinarily have been slain at all. Human nature, as well as the actual evidence, compels us to believe that the relatives of a kin-slayer would have revolted at the infliction of death, whether in Pelasgian or in historical times. Again, Aeschines suggests that the enemies of a man condemned to death were impotent to do more than attend as spectators at his execution when he says[185]: ‘It is not death that is so terrible: the really horrible thing is the insult suffered at the last moment of life. How pitiable a fate, to see an enemy’s face relaxing into a broad grin, and to hear with one’s ears the insults of enmity.’ This quotation has been taken by Glotz[186] to imply that the memory of private execution was still vivid in Athens in the time of Aeschines; but in our opinion it merely shows that public execution was a regular and established custom. A private enemy could have laughed as a freeman died: he could have counted the stripes and commanded their continuance, as a slave murderer was scourged to death. But his hand was bound: he could not strike the blow of vengeance.