Against Meidias

But it seems to me, Athenians, that it would be reasonable for you to do just the reverse, since your duty is to be solicitous for the common good of all. For who of you is unaware that the reason for the frequency of these assaults is the failure to punish the offenders, and that the only way to prevent such assaults in the future is adequately to punish every offender who is caught? Therefore, if it is to your interest to deter others, those cases are an additional reason for punishing Meidias, and punishing him the more severely in proportion to their number and their seriousness; but if you want to encourage him and everybody, you must let him off.

Then again we shall find that he has not the same claim to consideration as these others. For in the first case the man who struck the judge had three excuses: he was drunk, he was in love, and he did not know what he was doing in the darkness and the night. Polyzelus again explained that owing to his ungovernable temper he had lost his head when he committed the offence; there was no hostility behind the act and no intention to insult. But Meidias cannot plead any of these excuses, for he was my enemy, and he assaulted me willfully by daylight, and not only on that, but on every occasion he has shown a deliberate intention to insult me.

And indeed I can see no comparison between my own conduct and that of those others. In the first case it will be proved that the judge took no thought or concern for you or for the laws, but was privately induced by a sum of money—I cannot say how much—to drop his action. In the same way the man who was struck by Polyzelus was privately squared, laughed in his sleeve at you and your laws, and never even prosecuted his assailant.