The First Tetralogy: Anonymous Prosecution for Murder (1.11-2.4)

And so you must hold the avenging of the dead a personal duty; you must visit the defendant with retribution for the sin which was his alone; you must see that none but he suffers, and that the stain of guilt is removed from the city.

I am not far wrong, I think, in regarding myself as the most unlucky man alive. Others meet with misfortune. They may be buffeted by a tempest; but calm weather returns and they are buffeted no longer. They may fall ill; but they recover their health and are saved. Or some other mishap may overtake them; but it is followed by its opposite which brings relief.

With me this is not so. Not only did this man make havoc of my house during his lifetime; but he has caused me distress and anxiety in plenty since his death, even if I escape sentence; for so luckless is my lot that a godfearing and an honest life is not enough to save me. Unless I also find and convict the murderer, whom the dead man’s avengers cannot find, I shall myself be deemed guilty of murder and suffer an outrageous sentence of death.

Now the prosecution allege that it is very difficult to prove my guilt because of my astuteness. Yet in maintaining that my actions themselves prove me to be the criminal, they are assuming me to be a simpleton. For if the bitterness of my feud is a natural ground for your deeming me guilty today, it was still more natural for me to foresee before committing the crime that suspicion would settle upon me as it has done. I was more likely to go to the length of stopping anyone else whom I knew to be plotting the murder than deliberately to incur certain suspicion by committing it myself; for if, on the one hand, the crime in itself showed that I was the murderer,[*] I was doomed; while if, on the other hand, I escaped detection, I knew very well that suspicion would fall on me as it has done.

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.[*] 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.