23
My brother will appeal to you in the name of his mother who is alive and who killed her husband with out thought and without scruple; he hopes that if he is successful, she will escape paying the penalty for her crime. I, on the other hand, am appealing to you in the name of my father who is dead, that she may pay it in full; and it is in order that judgement may come upon wrongdoers for their misdeeds that you are yourselves constituted and called judges.
24
I am prosecuting to ensure that she pays for her crime and to avenge our father and your laws wherein you should support me one and all, if what I say is true. My brother, on the contrary, is defending this woman to enable one who has broken the laws to avoid paying for her misdeeds.
25
Yet which is the more just: that a willful murderer should be punished, or that he should not? Which has a better claim to pity, the murdered man or the murderess? To my mind, the murdered man: because in pitying him you would be acting more justly and more righteously in the eyes of gods and men. So now I ask that just as this woman put her husband to death without pity and without mercy, so she may herself be put to death by you and by justice;
26
for she was the willful murderess who compassed his death: he was the victim who involuntarily came to a violent end. I repeat, gentlemen, a violent end; for he was on the point of sailing from this country and was dining under a friend’s roof, when she, who had sent the poison, with orders that a draught be given him, murdered our father. What pity, then, what consideration, does a woman who refused to pity her own husband, who killed him impiously and shamefully, deserve from you or anyone else?
