88
I understand that he intends to refer to the oaths and agreements,Providing an amnesty for all except the Thirty, the Eleven who executed their orders, and their ten commissioners in the Peiraeus. and will tell us that his prosecution is a violation of the oaths and agreements that we of the Peiraeus contracted with the party of the town. Well, if he takes his stand on these, he practically admits that he is a murderer: at least, he makes an objection of oaths, or agreements, or lapse of time, or the words in the act; but in itself the case affords him no confidence of success in his trial.
89
Your duty, gentlemen of the jury, is to reject these arguments: you must bid him direct his defence to these questions—Did he make no depositions? Are those men not dead? Besides, I consider that the oaths and agreements in no way affect our position regarding this man. For the oaths have been taken between the parties of the town and of the Peiraeus.
90
If indeed, he was in the town while we were in the Peiraeus, the agreements would have been something for him to count upon; but the truth is that he was in the Peiraeus, like me and Dionysius and all these persons who are for punishing the man, so that we are faced with no objection there. For there was no oath taken between the men of the Peiraeus and the men of the Peiraeus.
91
In every view, I consider, he deserves more deaths than one; for the same man who says that the people have made him one of them is found to have injured the people whom he himself calls his father, by treacherously sapping the resources that they had for advancing their greatness and strength. Therefore, just as much as the man who struck his own natural father and denied him all necessaries of life, he who robbed his adoptive father of the means that he possessed is certainly, on this one score, as provided by the law of such maltreatment, deserving of the penalty of death.§ 91 appears to be a rhetorical expansion by a later hand.
