On the Crown (11-15)

Malicious as you are, Aeschines, you were strangely innocent when you imagined that I should turn aside from the discussion of public transactions to reply to your calumnies. I shall do nothing of the sort: I am not so infatuated. Your false and invidious charges against my political life I will examine; but later, if the jury wish to hear me, I will return to your outrageous ribaldry.

The crimes he has laid to my charge are many, and to some of them the law has assigned severe and even capital punishment. But the purpose of this prosecution goes further: it includes private malice and violence, railing and vituperation, and the like; and yet for none of these accusations, if made good, is there any power at all in the state to inflict an adequate penalty, or anything like it.

It is not right to debar a man from access to the Assembly and a fair hearing, still less to do so by way of spite and jealousy. No, by heavens, men of Athens, it is neither just, nor constitutional, nor honest! If he ever saw me committing crimes against the commonwealth, especially such frightful crimes as he described just now so dramatically, his duty was to avail himself of the legal penalties as soon as they were committed, impeaching me, and so putting me on my trial before the people, if my sins deserved impeachment, or indicting me for breach of the constitution, if I had proposed illegal measures. For, of course, if he prosecutes Ctesiphon now on my account, it is impossible that he would not have indicted me, with a certain hope of conviction!

Yet if he detected me in any of the acts which he has recounted to my prejudice, or in any other iniquity, there are statutes dealing with those offences, punishments, legal processes, trials involving severe penalties and heavy fines; and any of these proceedings he might have taken. Had he so acted, had he in that way employed the methods applicable to my case, his denunciations would have been consistent with his conduct;

but in fact he has deserted the path of right and justice, he has flinched from the proof of recent guilt, and then, after a long interval, he makes a hotchpotch of imputation and banter and scurrility, and stands on a false pretence, denouncing me, but indicting Ctesiphon. He sets in the forefront of the controversy his private quarrel with me, in which he has never confronted me fairly; yet he is avowedly seeking to disfranchise somebody else.