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Can it be that, now the tyrant has been slain, you are going to refuse the reward to the man who caused his death? What pettiness! Does it concern you how he died, as long as you enjoy your liberty? Do you demand any greater boon of the man who gave back your democracy? “But the law,” you say, “‘scrutinises only the main point in the facts of the case, ignoring all the incidentals and raising no further question!” What! was there not once a man who obtained the guerdon of a tyrannicide by just driving a tyrant into exile?The allusion is to Harmodius, who slew Hipparchus, the brother of the tyrant Hippias. Quite rightly, too; for he bestowed liberty in exchange for slavery. But what I have wrought is not exile, or expectation of a second uprising, but complete abolition, extinction of the entire line, extirpation, root and branch, of the whole menace.
