The Third Tetralogy: Prosecution for Murder Of One Who Pleads That He Was Acting in Self-Defence (2.9-3.4)

In this knowledge, make the prosecution bear the consequences of their sin; cleanse yourselves of guilt: and acquit me as righteousness and justice require you to do. Thus may all of us citizens best avoid defilement.

I am not surprised that the defendant, who has committed so outrageous a crime, should speak as he has acted; just as I pardon you, who are desirous of discovering the facts exactly, for tolerating such utterances from his lips as deserve to be greeted with derision. Thus, he admits that he gave the man the blows which caused his death; yet he not only denies that he himself is the dead man’s murderer, but asserts, alive and well though he is, that we, who are seeking vengeance for the victim, are his own murderers. And I wish to show that the remainder of his defense is of a similar character.

To begin with, he said that even if the man did die as a result of the blows, he did not kill him: because it is the aggressor who is to blame for what happens: it is he whom the law condemns; and the aggressor was the dead man. First, let me tell you that young men are more likely to be the aggressors and make a drunken assault than old. The young are incited by their natural arrogance,[*] their full vigor, and the unaccustomed effects of wine to give free play to anger: whereas old men are sobered by their experience of drunken excesses, by the weakness of age, and by their fear of the strength of the young.

Further, it was not with the same, but with vastly different weapons that the accused withstood him, as the facts themselves show. The one used hands which were in the fullness of their strength, and with them he slew; whereas the other defended himself but feebly against a stronger man, and died without leaving any mark of that defense behind him. Moreover, if it was with his hands and not with steel that the defendant slew, then the fact that his hands are more a part of himself than is steel makes him so much the more a murderer.

He further dared to assert that he who struck the first blow, even though he did not slay, is more truly the murderer than he who killed; for it is to the aggressor’s wilful act that the death was due, he says. But I maintain the very opposite. If our hands carry out the intentions of each of us, he who struck without killing was the wilful author of the blow alone: the willfull author of the death was he who struck and killed: for it was as the result of an intentional act on the part of the defendant that the man was killed.

Again, while the victim suffered the ill-effect of the mischance, it is the striker who suffered the mischance itself; for the one met his death as the result of the other’s act, so that it was not through his own mistake, but through the mistake of the man who struck him, that he was killed; whereas the other did more than he meant to do, and he had only himself to blame for the mischance whereby he killed a man whom he did not mean to slay.[*]