Leptines
5. An Athenian, known only as the proposer of a law taking away all special exemptions from the burden of public charges (ἀτέλειαι τῶν λειτουργιῶν), against which the celebrated oration of Demosthenes is directed, usually known as the oration against Leptines. This speech was delivered in B. C. 355: and the law must have been passed above a year before, as we are told that the lapse of more than that period had already exempted Leptines from all personal responsibility. Hence the efforts of Demosthenes were directed solely to the repeal of the law, not to the punishment of its proposer. It appears that his arguments were successful, and the law was in fact repealed. (See Wolf. Prolegom. ad Demosth. Orat. adv. Leptinem; Liban. Argum. p. 452; Dionys. Ep. ad Amm.. 1.4.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.