4
My plight is indeed hapless; I am forced not only to defend myself, but to reveal the criminals as well. Still, I must attempt this further task; nothing, it seems, is more relentless than necessity. I can expose the criminals, I may say, only by following the principle used by my accuser, who establishes the innocence of every one else and then asserts that the circumstances of death in themselves show the murderer to be me.An exceedingly difficult sentence to render clearly in English. The speaker means that he too is obliged from the nature of the case to resort to proof by elimination. The prosecution had argued (Antiph. 2.1.4-5) that death could not have been due to footpads, a drunken quarrel, or a mistaken assault, i.e. it cannot have been unpremeditated; therefore, since the circumstances showed it to have been violent, not natural (this is the point of αὐτὸς ὁ θάνατος in Antiph. 2.1.5), it was premeditated; and the defendant was alone likely to have planned such a crime. Here the defendant recapitulates this, actually quoting the words αὐτὸς ὁ θάνατος , which had formed part of the argument of the prosecution. If the apparent innocence of every one else is to fasten the crime upon me, it is only logical for me to be held guiltless, should others be brought under suspicion.
5
It is not, as the prosecution maintain, unlikely that a man wandering about at the dead of night should be murdered for his clothing; nothing is more likely. The fact that he was not stripped indicates nothing. If the approach of passers-by startled his assailants into quitting him before they had had time to strip him, they showed sense, not madness, in preferring their lives to their spoils.
