Daily Inspiration Quote by Aeschines

Aeschines is selling democracy the way a seasoned politician sells stability: not as a moral halo, but as a security system. The line draws a clean, almost prosecutorial contrast. In a democracy, you can sleep because the rules are bigger than the ruler; in a despotism or oligarchy, the ruler can only sleep by treating everyone else as a potential assassin. It is less a compliment to citizens than a diagnosis of regimes: lawful government doesn’t need paranoia to function, but unaccountable power does.

The subtext is pointedly Athenian. Aeschines is speaking from a city where “the laws” weren’t abstract principles; they were civic theater, publicly inscribed, argued in courts, invoked in assembly. The phrase “guard the person of the citizen” is doing double duty: it promises physical safety while also gesturing at dignity and standing. Your body, your rights, your place in the polis are secured not by proximity to a strongman but by a system you can appeal to.

The jab at “suspicion and armed guards” is rhetorical pressure. Aeschines doesn’t just say tyranny is unjust; he says it’s unstable and self-consuming. Power that can’t justify itself must protect itself. That’s a strategic move in a culture that had lived through coups, oligarchic takeovers, and the long shadow of Macedonian influence: he’s arguing that the price of concentrated power is permanent fear, and that fear eventually spills outward as repression. Democracy, in his framing, is not sentimental. It’s a better bargain.