For Polystratus

They do accuse him of having held many magistracies, but nobody is able to show that he was a bad magistrate. My own opinion is that it is not men of his character who are guilty of wrong in such situations, but some holder of a few offices who has not held them for the best advantage of the city. For our city was not betrayed by her good magistrates, but by her dishonest ones.

This man, first of all, as a magistrate in Oropus,[*](On the north coast of Attica.) neither betrayed you nor set up a new constitution when everyone else in office utterly betrayed their trust. They did not stay for the reckoning, thus convicting themselves of guilt; whereas he, feeling himself innocent, comes up for punishment!

The guilty are smuggled out by their accusers in return for payment; but those from whom they can get no profit they expose as guilty. They make similar accusations against those who have proposed some motion in the Council and against those who have not. But this man has not even proposed one motion regarding your people;

and I presume that these persons deserve no ill-treatment at your hands on the ground that, while they were loyal to you, they did not incur the enmity of that party.[*](The oligarchs.) For those who spoke in opposition to them were either exiled or put to death, so that whoever did aspire to oppose them in your interest was invariably deterred by fright or by the slaughter of their victims.