54
Yet mark how righteously and admirably these distinctions are severally defined by the lawgiver who defined them originally. If a man kill another in an athletic contest, he declared him to be not guilty, for this reason, that he had regard not to the event but to the intention of the agent. That intention is, not to kill his man, but to vanquish him unslain. If the other combatant was too weak to support the struggle for victory, he considered him responsible for his own fate, and therefore provided no retribution on his account.
55
Again, if in battle unwittingly—the man who so slays is free of bloodguiltiness. Good: If I have destroyed a man supposing him to be one of the enemy, I deserve, not to stand trial, but to be forgiven. Or in intercourse with his wife, or mother, or sister, or daughter, or concubine kept for the procreation of legitimate children. He lets the man who slays one so treating any of these women go scot-free; and that acquittal, men of Athens, is the most righteous of all.
56
Why? Because in the defence of those for whose sake we fight our enemies, to save them from indignity and licentiousness, he permitted us to slay even our friends, if they insult them and defile them in defiance of law. Men are not our friends and our foes by natural generation: they are made such by their own actions; and the law gives us freedom to chastise as enemies those whose acts are hostile. When there are so many conditions that justify the slaying of anyone else, it is monstrous that that man should be the only man in the world whom, even under those conditions, it is to be unlawful to slay.
