ABSTRACT
The penalty imposed in public cases in Athens on a prosecutor who failed to win his case, obtaining fewer than one-fifth of the jury's votes, has been thoroughly discussed in recent years by two of our colleagues, Edward Harris and Robert Wallace. Epobelia means a payment of one obol per drachma, in other words one-sixth of a sum of money. It is obvious, therefore, that there can be epobelia only when a sum of money is under consideration. Thus in a case in which the matter in dispute or the penalty demanded was not monetary, for example the death penalty, there could not be epobelia, because one could not pay one-sixth of that penalty. Epobelia would seem most appropriate when the prosecutor was claiming a sum of money from the defendant: if the prosecution failed, he would have to pay the defendant one-sixth of the amount he had demanded, as compensation for the trouble he had caused him.
