37
If we are to judge from probability, it is obviously the second which is the truer; he was lying to benefit himself, but on finding that those lies were proving fatal, he thought that he would be saved by telling the truth. However, he had no one to stand up for the truth, as I, who was vindicated by his second, true statement, was unfortunately not present; while there were those who were ready to put his first, his false one, beyond all reach of future correction. As a rule, it is the victim who quietly seizes an informer and then makes away with him. In this case, it is the very persons who arrested the slave in order to discover the truth who have done so;
38
and it is the very person who had supplied information against myself with whom they have made away. Had I myself been responsible for his disappearance, had I refused to surrender him to the prosecution or declined to establish the truth in some other way, they would have treated that very fact as most significant: it would have furnished the strongest presumption in their favor that I was guilty. So now that they themselves have declined to submit to an inquiry, in spite of a challenge from my friends to do so, that fact should in the same way furnish a presumption in my favor that the charge which they are bringing is a false one.Cf. Antiph. 1.11, Prosecution of the Stepmother, and Antiph. 6.27, On the Choreutes, for a similar line of argument.
39
They further allege that the slave admitted under torture that he had been my accomplice in the murder. I maintain that he did not say this; what he said was that he conducted Herodes and myself off the boat, and that after I had murdered him, he helped me pick him up and put him in the boat; then he threw him into the sea.
