On the Murder of Herodes (11-15)

Secondly, as of course you all know, every court judges cases of murder in the open air, and for good reasons: first, that the jurors may avoid entering the same building as those whose hands are unclean: and secondly, that he who is conducting the prosecution for murder may avoid being under the same roof as the murderer. No one but yourself has ever dreamed of evading this law. And not only that you should, as a preliminary, have taken the most solemn and binding oath known,[*] swearing, under pain of causing yourself, your kin, and your house to perish from the earth, that you would accuse me only in connection with the murder itself, to the effect that I committed it; whereby, however numerous my crimes, I could have been condemned only on the charge before the court, and however numerous my good deeds, none of those good deeds could have gained me an acquittal.

This requirement you have evaded. You have invented laws to suit yourself. You, the prosecutor, are not on oath; nor are the witnesses, who are giving evidence against me which they should have given only after taking the same preliminary oath as yourself, their hands on the sacrifice as they did so. You bid the court, moreover, believe your witnesses, in spite of their not being on oath, and pass sentence for murder—when your own evasion of the laws of the land has destroyed the trustworthiness of those witnesses. Yes, you imagine that, in the eyes of the court, the laws themselves should have less authority than your own actions in defiance of them.

You reply that if I had been allowed my freedom, I should have made off without awaiting my trial—as though you had forced me to enter this country against my will. Yet if I attached no importance to being debarred from Athens for the future, it was equally open to me either to disregard the summons to appear in court and so lose the case by default, or to avail myself of the right given to every one of leaving the country after making the first speech for the defense.[*] You, however, for purely personal reasons, are trying to rob me, and me alone, of a privilege accorded to every Greek, by framing a law to suit yourself.

Yet it would be unanimously agreed, I think, that the laws which deal with cases such as the present are the most admirable and righteous of all laws. Not only have they the distinction of being the oldest in this country, but they have changed no more than the crime with which they are concerned; and that is the surest token of good laws, as time and experience show mankind what is imperfect. Hence you must not use the speech for the prosecution to discover whether your laws are good or bad: you must use the laws to discover whether or not the speech for the prosecution is giving you a correct and lawful interpretation of the case.[*]

The laws concerned with the taking of life are thus excellent, and no one has ever before ventured to interfere with them. You alone have had the audacity to turn legislator and substitute worse for better; and the object of this arbitrary behavior of yours is to have me put to death without just cause. In fact, your infringement of the law is itself decisive evidence in my favor, because you well knew that you would find no one to testify to my guilt once he had taken that preliminary oath.