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Charondas also wrote a law against men who had left their post in war or had refused to take up arms at all in defence of their fatherland. Other lawmakers had made death the punishment of such men, but Charondas ordered that they should sit for three days in the market-place dressed in women's clothes. [2] And this law is not only more humane than those of other peoples but it also imperceptibly, by the severity of the disgrace it inflicts, diverts others of like mind from cowardice; for it is better to die than to experience such a gross indignity in one's fatherland. Moreover, he did not do away with the guilty men but preserved them for the state against the needs of wartime, believing that they would make amends, by reason of the punishment caused by that disgrace, and would be eager to wipe out their former shame by bolder deeds of bravery. [3]

The lawgiver also preserved the laws he made by means of their severity. That is, he commanded that under every circumstance obedience should be rendered to the law even if it had been altogether wrongly conceived; but he allowed any law to be corrected, if it needed correction. [4] For he took the position that although it was right enough that a man should be overruled by a lawgiver, to be overruled by one in private station was quite preposterous, even if that serves the general interest. And it was especially by this means that he prevented men who present in jury-courts the pretences and cunning devices of those who have violated the laws in place of the literal terms of the laws from destroying by inventive sophistries their supremacy. [5] As a consequence, we are told, to certain men who had offered such arguments before the jurors who were passing on the punishment of men who had violated the law, he said, "You must save either the law or the man."

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

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