35
And these are their brilliant and vigorous pleas, What! Are we not to give testimony for one another? Isn’t that the way of comrades and friends? What is there that you really fear in the charges he will bring against you? Do some people say they saw him being beaten? We will testify that he wasn’t even touched by you. That his cloak was stripped off? We will testify that they had done this first to you. That his lip has been sewn up? We will say that your head or something else has been broken.
36
But I bring forward surgeons also as witnesses. This, men of the jury, is not the case with them, but except what is deposed by themselves they will have not a single witness against me. But Heaven knows I could not tell you how great and how reckless a readiness you may expect on their part to perpetrate anything whatever.
36
Now that you may know what sort of things they do as they go about—read them these depositions, and do you check the flow of the water.
36
The Depositions
37
Well then, if people break into houses and beat those who come in their way, do you suppose they would scruple to swear falsely on a scrap of paper in the interest of one another—these men who are partners in such great and such reckless malignity and villainy and impudence and outrage? For I certainly think that all these terms fit the deeds they are in the habit of doing. And yet there are other deeds of theirs more dreadful even than these, though I should be unable to find out all who have suffered from them.
