The First Tetralogy

When a crime is planned by an ordinary person, it is not hard to expose; but to detect and expose criminals who are naturally able, who are men of experience, and who have reached an age when their faculties are at their best, is no easy matter.

The enormous risk makes them devote a great deal of thought to the problem of executing the crime in safety, and they take no steps until they have completely secured themselves against suspicion. With these facts in mind, you must place implicit confidence in any and every indication from probability presented to you.

We, on the other hand, who are seeking satisfaction for the murder, are not letting the guilty escape and bringing the innocent into court; we know very well that as the whole city is defiled by the criminal until he is brought to justice, the sin becomes ours and the punishment for your error falls upon us, if our prosecution is misdirected. Thus, as the entire defilement falls upon us, we shall try to show you as conclusively as our knowledge allows that the defendant killed the dead man.

Malefactors are not likely to have murdered him, as nobody who was exposing his life to a very grave risk would forgo the prize when it was securely within his grasp; and the victims were found still wearing their cloaks. Nor again did anyone in liquor kill him: the murderer’s identity would be known to his boon companions. Nor again was his death the result of a quarrel; they would not have been quarrelling at the dead of night or in a deserted spot. Nor did the criminal strike the dead man when intending to strike someone else; he would not in that case have killed master and slave together.

As all grounds for suspecting that the crime was unpremeditated are removed, it is clear from the circumstances of death themselves that the victim was deliberately murdered. Now who is more likely to have attacked him than a man who had already suffered cruelly at his hands and who was expecting to suffer more cruelly still? That man is the defendant. He was an old enemy of the other, and indicted him on several serious charges without success.

On the other hand, he has himself been indicted on charges still more numerous and still more grave, and not once has he been acquitted, with the result that he has lost a good deal of his property. Further, he had recently been indicted by the dead man for embezzling sacred monies, the sum to be recovered being assessed at two talents; he knew himself to be guilty, experience had taught him how powerful his opponent was, and he bore him a grudge for the past; so he naturally plotted his death: he naturally sought protection against his enemy by murdering him.

Thirst for revenge made him forget the risk, and the overpowering fear of the ruin which threatened him spurred him to all the more reckless an attack. In taking this step he hoped not only that his guilt would remain undiscovered, but that he would also escape the indictment;

nobody, he thought, would proceed with the suit, and judgement would go by default; while in the event of his losing his case after all, he considered it better to have revenged himself for his defeat than, like a coward, to be ruined by the indictment without retaliating. And he knew very well that he would lose it, or he would not have thought the present trial the safer alternative.

Such are the motives which drove him to sin as he did. Had there been eyewitnesses in large numbers, we should have produced them in large numbers; but as the dead man’s attendant was alone present, those who heard his statement will give evidence; for he was still alive when picked up, and in reply to our questions stated that the only assailant whom he had recognized was the defendant.

Inferences from probability and eyewitnesses have alike proved the defendant’s guilt: so both justice and expediency absolutely forbid you to acquit him.

Not only would it be impossible to convict deliberate criminals if they are not to be convicted by eyewitnesses and by such inferences; but it is against all your interests that this polluted wretch should profane the sanctity of the divine precincts by setting foot within them, or pass on his defilement to the innocent by sitting at the same tables as they. It is this that causes dearth and public calamity.

And so you must hold the avenging of the dead a personal duty; you must visit the defendant with retribution for the sin which was his alone; you must see that none but he suffers, and that the stain of guilt is removed from the city.

I am not far wrong, I think, in regarding myself as the most unlucky man alive. Others meet with misfortune. They may be buffeted by a tempest; but calm weather returns and they are buffeted no longer. They may fall ill; but they recover their health and are saved. Or some other mishap may overtake them; but it is followed by its opposite which brings relief.

With me this is not so. Not only did this man make havoc of my house during his lifetime; but he has caused me distress and anxiety in plenty since his death, even if I escape sentence; for so luckless is my lot that a godfearing and an honest life is not enough to save me. Unless I also find and convict the murderer, whom the dead man’s avengers cannot find, I shall myself be deemed guilty of murder and suffer an outrageous sentence of death.

Now the prosecution allege that it is very difficult to prove my guilt because of my astuteness. Yet in maintaining that my actions themselves prove me to be the criminal, they are assuming me to be a simpleton. For if the bitterness of my feud is a natural ground for your deeming me guilty today, it was still more natural for me to foresee before committing the crime that suspicion would settle upon me as it has done. I was more likely to go to the length of stopping anyone else whom I knew to be plotting the murder than deliberately to incur certain suspicion by committing it myself; for if, on the one hand, the crime in itself showed that I was the murderer, I was doomed; while if, on the other hand, I escaped detection, I knew very well that suspicion would fall on me as it has done.

My plight is indeed hapless; I am forced not only to defend myself, but to reveal the criminals as well. Still, I must attempt this further task; nothing, it seems, is more relentless than necessity. I can expose the criminals, I may say, only by following the principle used by my accuser, who establishes the innocence of every one else and then asserts that the circumstances of death in themselves show the murderer to be me. If the apparent innocence of every one else is to fasten the crime upon me, it is only logical for me to be held guiltless, should others be brought under suspicion.

It is not, as the prosecution maintain, unlikely that a man wandering about at the dead of night should be murdered for his clothing; nothing is more likely. The fact that he was not stripped indicates nothing. If the approach of passers-by startled his assailants into quitting him before they had had time to strip him, they showed sense, not madness, in preferring their lives to their spoils.

Further, he may not in fact have been murdered for his clothing; he may have seen others engaged in some quite different outrage and have been killed by them to prevent his giving information of the crime; who knows? Again, were not those who hated him almost as much as I did—and there were a great many—more likely to have murdered him than I? It was plain to them that suspicion would fall on me; while I knew very well that I should bear the blame for them.

Why, moreover, should the evidence of the attendant be allowed any weight? In his terror at the peril in which he stood, there was no likelihood of his recognizing the murderers. On the other hand, it was likely enough that he would obediently confirm any suggestions made by his masters. We distrust the evidence of slaves in general, or we should not torture them; so what justification have you for putting me to death on the evidence of this one?

Further, whoever allows probability the force of fact when it testifies to my guilt must on the same principle bear the following in mind as evidence of my innocence; it was more likely that, with an eye to carrying out my plot in safety, I should take the precaution of not being present at the scene of the crime than that the slave should recognize me distinctly just as his throat was being cut.

I will now show that, unless I was mad, I must have thought the danger in which I now stand far greater, instead of less, than the danger to be expected from the indictment. If I was convicted on the indictment, I knew that I should be stripped of my property; but I did not lose my life or civic rights. I should still have been alive, still left to enjoy those rights and even though I should have had to obtain a loan of money from my friends, my fate would not have been the worst possible. On the other hand, if I am found guilty today and put to death, my children will inherit from me an insufferable disgrace; if instead I go into exile, I shall become a beggar in a strange land, an old man without a country.

Thus not one of the charges brought against me has any foundation. But even if the probabilities, as distinct from the facts, point to me as the murderer, it is acquittal that I deserve from you far more than anything else; since first, it is clear that if I struck back, it was only because I was being deeply wronged; had that not been so, it would never have been thought likely that I was the murderer; and secondly, it is the murderers, not those accused of the murder, whom it is your duty to convict.

As I am completely cleared of the charge, it is not I who will profane the sanctity of the gods when I set foot within their precincts, any more than it is I who am sinning against them in urging you to acquit me. It is those who are prosecuting an innocent man like myself, while they let the criminal escape, to whom dearth is due; it is they who deserve in full the penalty which they say should be inflicted upon me, for urging you to become guilty of impiety.

If this is the treatment which the prosecution deserve, you must put no faith in them. I myself, on the other hand, as you will see by examining my past life, do not form plots or covet what does not belong to me. On the contrary, I have made several substantial payments to the Treasury, I have more than once served as Trierarch, I have furnished a brilliant chorus, I have often advanced money to friends, and I have frequently paid large sums under guarantees given for others; my wealth has come not from litigation, but from hard work; and I have been a religious and law-abiding man. If my character is such as this, you must not deem me guilty of anything sinful or dishonorable.

Were my enemy alive and prosecuting me, I should not be resting content with a defense; I should have shown what a scoundrel he was himself and what scoundrels are those who, while professedly his champions, seek in fact to enrich themselves at my expense over the charge which I am facing. However, more out of decency than in fairness to myself, I shall refrain. Instead, I entreat you, gentlemen, you who are empowered to decide the most critical of issues; take pity on my misfortune and remedy it; do not join my opponents in their attack; do not allow them to make an end of me without regard to justice or the powers above.

It is an outrage to misfortune that he should use it to cloak his crime, in the hope of concealing his defilement. Neither does he deserve your pity he did not consult his victim’s wishes in bringing doom upon him: whereas he did consult his own before exposing himself to danger. We proved in our first speech that he is the murderer; we shall now endeavor to show by examination that his defense was unsound.

Assume that the murderers hurried off, leaving their victims before they had stripped them, because they noticed the approach of passers-by. Then even if the persons who came upon them found the master dead, they would have found the slave still conscious, as he was picked up alive and gave evidence. They would have questioned him closely and have informed us who the criminals were; so that the defendant would not have been accused. Or assume, on the other hand, that others, who had been seen by the two committing some similar outrage, had murdered them to keep the matter dark. Then news of that outrage would have been published at the same time as the news of the present murder, and suspicion would have fallen on those concerned in it.

Again, how persons whose position was not so serious should have plotted against the dead man sooner than persons who had more to fear, I fail to understand. The fears and sense of injury of the second were enough to put an end to caution; whereas with the first the risk and disgrace involved, to which their resentment could not blind them, were sufficient to sober the anger in their hearts, even if they had intended to do the deed.

The defense are wrong when they say that the evidence of the slave is not to be trusted; where evidence of this sort is concerned, slaves are not tortured; they are given their freedom. It is when they deny a theft or conspire with their masters to keep silence that we believe them to tell the truth only under torture.

Again, the probabilities are not in favor of his having been absent from the scene of the crime rather than present at it. In remaining absent he was going to run the same risks as he would run if present, as any of his confederates if caught would have shown that it was he who had originated the plot. And not only that; he was going to dispatch the business on hand less satisfactorily, as not one of the criminals taking part would have felt the same enthusiasm for the deed.

Further, he did not believe the danger threatened by the indictment to be less serious than that in which he now stands, but much more so, as I will prove to you. Let us assume that his expectations of conviction or acquittal were the same in the one suit as in the other. Now he had no hope of the indictment being dropped as long as his enemy was alive; his entreaties would never have been listened to. But he did not, on the other hand, expect to be involved in the present trial, as he thought that he could commit the murder without being found out.

Again, in claiming an acquittal on the ground that he could foresee that he would be suspected, he is arguing falsely. If the defendant, whose position was desperate could be deterred from violence by the knowledge that suspicion would fall on himself, nobody at all would have planned the crime. Every one who stood in less danger than he would have been more frightened by the certainty of being suspected than by that danger, and would therefore have been less ready than he to use violence.

His contributions to the Treasury and his provision of choruses may be satisfactory evidence of his wealth; but they are anything but evidence of his innocence. It was precisely his fear of losing his wealth which drove him to commit the murder; though an unscrupulous crime, it was to be expected of him. He objects that murderers are not those who were to be expected to commit murder, but those who actually did so. Now he would be quite right, provided that those who did commit it were known to us; but as they are not, proof must be based on what was to be expected; and that shows that the defendant, and the defendant alone, is the murderer. Crimes of this kind are committed in secret, not in front of witnesses.

As he has been proved guilty of the murder so conclusively from his own defense, he is simply asking you to transfer his own defilement to yourselves. We make no requests; we merely remind you that if neither inferences from probability nor the evidence of witnesses prove the defendant guilty today, there remains no means of proving any defendant guilty.

As you see, there is no doubt about the circumstances of the murder; suspicion points plainly to the defendant; and the evidence of the slave is to be trusted so how can you in fairness acquit him? And if you acquit him unfairly, it is not upon us that the dead man’s curse will lie; it is upon you that he will bring disquiet.

So with this in mind come to the victim’s aid, punish his murderer, and cleanse the city. Do this, and you will do three beneficial things; you will reduce the number of deliberate criminals; you will increase that of the godfearing; and you will yourselves be rid of the defilement which rests upon you in the defendant’s name.

See, I have chosen to place myself at the mercy of the misfortune which you have been told that I blame unfairly, and at the mercy of my enemies here; for much as I am alarmed by their wholesale distortion of the facts, I have faith in your judgement and in the true story of my conduct; though if the prosecution deny me even the right of lamenting before you the misfortunes which have beset me, I do not know where to fly for refuge, so utterly startling—or should I say villainous?—are the methods which are being used to misrepresent me. They pretend that they are prosecuting to avenge a murder; yet they defend all the true suspects, and then assert that I am a murderer because they cannot find the criminal. The fact that they are flatly disregarding their appointed duty shows that their object is not so much to punish the murderer as to have me wrongfully put to death.

I myself ought simply to be replying to the evidence of the attendant, for I am not here to inform you of the murderers or prove them guilty; I am answering a charge which has been brought against me. However, in order to make it completely clear that the prosecution have designs upon my life and that no suspicion can attach itself to me, I must, quite unnecessarily, go further.

I ask only that my misfortune, which is being used to discredit me, may turn to good fortune; and I call upon you to acquit and congratulate me rather than condemn and pity me. According to the prosecution, those who came up during the assault were one and all more likely to inquire exactly who the murderers were and carry the news to the victims’ home than to take to their heels and leave them to their fate.

But I, for my part, do not believe that there exists a human being so reckless or so brave that, on coming upon men writhing in their death agony in the middle of the night, he would not turn round and run away rather than risk his life by inquiring after the malefactors responsible. Now since it is more likely that the passers-by behaved in a natural manner, you cannot logically continue to treat the footpads who murdered the pair for their clothing as innocent, any more than suspicion can still attach itself to me.

As to whether or not proclamation of some other outrage was made at the time of the murder, who knows? Nobody felt called upon to inquire and as the question is an open one, it is quite possible to suppose that the malefactors concerned in such an outrage committed the murder.

Why, moreover, should the evidence of the slave be thought more trustworthy than that of free men? Free men are disfranchised and fined, should their evidence be considered false; whereas this slave, who gave us no opportunity of either cross-examining or torturing him—when can he be punished? Nay, when can he be cross-examined? He could make a statement in perfect safety; so it is only natural that he was induced to lie about me by his masters, who are enemies of mine. On the other hand, it would be nothing short of impious were I put to death by you on evidence which was untrustworthy.

According to the prosecution, it is harder to believe that I was absent from the scene of the crime than that I was present at it. But I myself, by using not arguments from probability but facts, will prove that I was not present. All the slaves in my possession, male or female, I hand over to you for torture; and if you find that I was not at home in bed that night, or that I left the house, I agree that I am the murderer. The night can be identified, as the murder was committed during the Diipoleia.

As regards my wealth, my fears for which are said to have furnished a natural motive for the murder, the facts are precisely the opposite. It is the unfortunate who gain by arbitrary methods, as they expect changes to cause a change in their own sorry plight. It pays the fortunate to safeguard their prosperity by living peaceably, as change turns their good fortune into bad.

Again, although the prosecution pretend to base their proof of my guilt on inferences from probability, they assert not that I am the probable, but that I am the actual murderer. Moreover, those inferences have in fact been proved to be in my favor rather than theirs—for not only has the witness for the prosecution been proved untrustworthy, but he cannot be cross-examined. Similarly, I have shown that the presumptions are in my favor and not in favor of the prosecution and the trail of guilt has been proved to lead not to me, but to those whom the prosecution are treating as innocent. Thus the charges made against me have been shown without exception to be unfounded. But it does not follow that there is no way of convicting criminals, if I am acquitted; it does follow that there is no way of effectively defending persons accused, if I am sentenced.

You see how unjustifiably my accusers are attacking me. Yet notwithstanding the fact that it is they who are endeavoring to have me put to death in so impious a fashion, they maintain that they themselves are guiltless; according to them, it is I who am acting impiously—I, who am urging you to show yourselves godfearing men. But as I am innocent of all their charges, I adjure you on my own behalf to respect the righteousness of the guiltless, just as on the dead man’s behalf I remind you of his right to vengeance and urge you not to let the guilty escape by punishing the innocent; once I am put to death, no one will continue the search for the criminal.

Respect these considerations, and satisfy heaven and justice by acquitting me. Do not wait until remorse proves to you your mistake; remorse in cases such as this has no remedy.