Defense Against a Charge of Subverting the Democracy

I can find full excuse for you, gentlemen of the jury, if on hearing such statements and remembering past events you are equally incensed against all those who remained in the city. But I am surprised at my accusers: they neglect their own concerns to attend to those of others, and now, though they know for certain who are guilty of nothing and who have committed many offences, they seek to persuade you into holding this same opinion about us all.

Now, if they conceive that they have charged me with everything that the city has suffered at the hands of the Thirty, I consider them to be speakers of no ability; for they have not mentioned so much as a small fraction of what has been perpetrated by those men. But if their statements imply that I had any connection with those things, I shall prove that their words are nothing but lies, and that on my part I behaved as the best citizen in the Peiraeus would have done, if he had remained in the city.

I beg you, gentlemen, not to share the views of the slander-mongers. Their business is to inculpate even those who have committed no offence, —for it is out of them especially that they would make money,[*](An inoffensive, peaceable man would usually prefer paying an informer blackmail to undergoing the trouble and risk of a legal action. Cf. Xen. Mem. 2.9.1.)—while yours is to allow an equal enjoyment of civic rights to those who have done no wrong; for in this way you will secure to the established constitution the greatest number of allies.

And I claim, gentlemen, if I am found to have been the cause of none of our disasters, but rather to have performed many services to the State with both my person and my purse, that at any rate I should have that support from you which is the just desert, not merely of those who have served you well, but also of those who have done you no wrong.

Now, I consider that I have a strong justification in the fact that, if my accusers were able to convict me of wrongdoing in private life, they would not charge me with the misdeeds of the Thirty: they would not see occasion to traduce others on the score of what those persons have perpetrated, but only to requite the actual wrongdoers. But in fact they conceive that your resentment against those men is sufficient to involve in their ruin those who have done no harm at all.