על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ג ל׳On the Special Laws, Book III 30
א׳
1[157] Still these can plead in their defence that they seek no profit and are moved by exceeding affection for their nearest of kin, to save whom they propose cheerfully to lay down their lives.
ב׳
2[158] But the other kind, the cruel of heart and bestial of nature, would be spurned, I need not say by all respectable people, but by any who are not thoroughly uncivilized in soul. I mean those who either secretly and craftily or boldly and openly threaten to inflict the most grievous sufferings on one set of persons in substitution for another and seek the destruction of those who have done no wrong on the pretext of their friendship or kinship, or partnership, or some similar connexion, with the culprits. And they sometimes do this without having suffered any grievous harm but merely through covetousness and rapine.
ג׳
3[159] An example of this was given a little time ago in our own district by a person who was appointed to serve as a collector of taxes. When some of his debtors whose default was clearly due to poverty took flight in fear of the fatal consequences of his vengeance, he carried off by force their womenfolk and children and parents and their other relatives and beat and subjected them to every kind of outrage and contumely in order to make them either tell him the whereabouts of the fugitive or discharge his debt themselves. As they could do neither the first for want of knowledge, nor the second because they were as penniless as the fugitive, he continued this treatment until while wringing their bodies with racks and instruments of torture he finally dispatched them by newly-invented methods of execution.
ד׳
4[160] He filled a large basket with sand and having hung this enormous weight by ropes round their necks set them in the middle of the market-place in the open air, in order that while they themselves sank under the cruel stress of the accumulated punishments, the wind, the sun, the shame of being seen by the passers-by and the weights suspended on them, the spectators of their punishments might suffer by anticipation.
ה׳
5[161] Some of these, whose souls saw facts more vividly than did their eyes, feeling themselves maltreated in the bodies of others, hastened to take leave of their lives with the aid of sword or poison or halter, thinking that in their evil plight it was a great piece of luck to die without suffering torture.
ו׳
6[162] The others who had not seized the opportunity to dispatch themselves were brought out in a row, as is done in the awarding of inheritances, first those who stood in the first degrees of kinship, after them the second, then the third and so on till the last. And when there were no kinsmen left, the maltreatment was passed on to their neighbours and sometimes even to villages and cities which quickly became desolate and stripped of their inhabitants who left their homes and dispersed to places where they expected to remain unobserved.
ז׳
7[163] Yet perhaps it is not to be wondered at if uncivilized persons who have never had a taste of humane culture, when they have to collect the revenue in obedience to imperious orders levy the annual tributes not only on property but on bodies, and even on the life when they bring their terrors to bear upon these substitutes for the proper debtors.
ח׳
8[164] Indeed in the past the legislators themselves, who are the landmarks and standards of justice, have not shrunk from acting as such to the greatest injustice. With an eye to men’s opinions rather then to truth they have ordained that the fate of traitors and tyrants should be shared by the children in the first case and by the next five families in the second.
ט׳
9[165] Why, one might ask? If they were companions in error let them also be companions in punishment, but if they had no association with the others, never followed the same objects, never let elation at the success of their kinsmen tempt them to a life of ease and pleasure, why should they be put to death? Is their relationship the one sole reason? Then is it birth or lawless actions which deserve punishment?
י׳
10[166] Probably you, most reverend lawgivers, had worthy people for relations. If they had been bad, I do not think the idea of such enactments would have entered your minds. Indeed you would have been indignant if others had proposed them, for you would have taken precautions that the man who lives in safety should not suffer ruin with those who run into danger, nor be set on a level with them in misfortune. Of the two situations one involves a danger which you would guard against and not allow another to incur: the other has nothing to fear and a sense of security often persuades people to neglect insuring the safety of the innocent.
י״א
11[167] So then our legislator took these things into consideration and observing the errors current among other nations regarded them with aversion as ruinous to the ideal commonwealth; persons whose conduct shewed any kind of sloth or inhumanity or vice he detested and would not ever surrender anyone whose life had been passed in their company to be punished with them and thus made an appendix to the crimes of others.
י״ב
12[168] He therefore expressly forbade that sons should be slain instead of fathers or fathers instead of sons. Thereby also he gave it as his judgement that persons who had sinned should be the persons who were punished, whether the punishment consisted of monetary fines or stripes and injurious treatment of a still more violent kind, or wounds and maiming and disfranchisement and exile or any other kind of sentence. For in the single statement that one man should not be killed instead of another he included also the cases which he left unmentioned.