35
Moreover, the legislator who instituted ostracism appears to me to have had the following intention. Observing that whenever members of the community are more powerful than the magistrates and the laws, it is impossible for an individual to obtain redress from them, he arranged that punishment for their misdeeds should be exacted by the state. Now I myself have been publicly tried four times, and have never prevented any private person who so desired from bringing me to justice. On the other hand, Alcibiades, who has worked such mischief, has never yet dared to answer for it in any way whatsoever.
36
So forbidding is he that instead of punishing him for the wrongs which he has done already, men fear him for what he will do hereafter; and while it pays his victims to suffer in silence, he himself is not satisfied unless he can work his will in the future also. Yet I hardly deserve to be ostracized, gentlemen, if I do not deserve to be put to deathA quibble. The speaker tries to argue that if he was acquitted when tried for his life, he must similarly be acquitted when the penalty in question is exile for ten years.; and if I was acquitted when brought to trial, I cannot deserve to be sent into exile when no trial has taken place; nor after vindicating myself so many times in court can I be thought to merit banishment on the same grounds of accusation again.
37
It may be objected that when I was prosecuted, the attack made upon me was a weak one, that my accusers were unimpressive, or that the case was conducted by casual enemies instead of by those who excel both as speakers and as men of action and who, in fact, brought about the death of two of the persons charged with the same offences as myself. I answer that justice requires you to banish, not those whom, after repeated inquiry, you have found to be innocent, but those who refuse to render to the state an account of their past.
