Ariston Against Conon, an Action for Assault (31-35)

he puts into the box a false deposition, and writes at the head of it as witnesses the names of people whom I think you will know well when you hear them— Diotimus, son of Diotimus, of Icaria,[*] Archebiades, son of Demoteles, of Halae,[*] Chaeretimus, son of Chaerimenes, of Pithus,[*] depose that they were returning from a dinner with Conon, and came upon Ariston and the son of Conon fighting in the agora, and that Conon did not strike Ariston,

—as though you would believe them off-hand, and would have no regard to the truth of the matter that, to begin with, Lysistratus and Paseas and Niceratus and Diodorus, who have expressly testified that they saw me being beaten by Conon, stripped of my cloak, and suffering all the other forms of brutal outrage I experienced—men, remember, who were unacquainted with me and who happened on the affair by chance—that these men, I say, would never in the world have consented to give testimony which they would have known to be false, if they had not seen the maltreatment which I received; and, secondly, that I myself, if I had not been thus treated by the defendant, should never have let off men who are admitted by my opponents themselves to have struck me, and have chosen to proceed first against the one who never laid a finger on me.

Why should I? No; the man who was first to strike me and from whom I suffered the greatest indignity, he it is whom I am suing, whom I abhor, and whom I am now prosecuting. My words, then, are all true and are proved to be so, whereas the defendant, if he had not brought forward these witnesses, had, I take it, not an argument to advance, but would have had silently to undergo an immediate conviction. But it stands to reason, that these men, who have been partners in his drinking bouts and have shared in many deeds of this sort, have given false testimony. If matters are to come to this pass, if once certain people shall prove shameless enough to give manifestly false testimony, and there shall be no advantage in the truth, it will be a terrible state of things.

Ah but, they will say, they are not people of that sort. I am inclined to think, however, that many of you know Diotimus and Archebiades and Chaeretimus, the grey-headed man yonder, men who by day put on sour looks and pretend to play the Spartan[*] and wear short cloaks and single-soled shoes, but when they get together and are by themselves leave no form of wickedness or indecency untried.

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.