Against Alcibiades: For Deserting the Ranks

There were others who had never before served in the infantry, but had always been cavalrymen and had inflicted many losses on the enemy: yet they did not venture to mount their horses, from fear of you and of the law. For they had shaped their plans on the prospect, not of the city’s destruction, but of its deliverance, its ascendancy and its retaliation upon wrongdoers. But Alcibiades was rash enough to mount, though he is no supporter of the people, nor had seen service in the cavalry before, nor is qualified for it now, nor had passed your scrutiny: he presumed that the city would be without the power to do justice upon wrongdoers.

You must reflect that, if men are to be permitted to do whatever they please, it is useless to have your code of laws, your Assemblies, or your election of generals. And I wonder, gentlemen, at anyone considering it right, when a man has retired, at the approach of the enemy, from his post in the first rank to a place in the second, to convict him of cowardice, and then, if a man has appeared in the cavalry when his post was in the infantry, to grant him a pardon!