One thing above all you must remember, and I hope that you will forgive me for repeatedly stressing the same point; but my danger is great, and only if you form a right judgement, am I safe; if you are misled, I am doomed. I repeat, let no one cause you to forget that the prosecution put the informer to death, that they used every effort to prevent his appearance in court and to make it impossible for me to take him and examine him under torture on my return;

although to allow me to do so was to their own advantage.Since, if his statements were true, he would adhere to them when examined by Euxitheus, and the prosecution would be able to take advantage of the fact in court. Instead, they bought the slave and put him to death, entirely on their own initiative—put the informer himself to death, without any official sanction, and without the excuse that he was guilty of the murder. They should of course have kept him in custody, or surrendered him to my friends on security, or else handed him over to the magistrates of Athens in order that his fate might be decided by a court. As it was, you sentenced him to death on your own authority and executed him, when even an allied state is denied the right of inflicting the death-penalty in such fashion without the consent of the Athenian people.The evidence of inscriptions confirms this. Decrees regulating the relation between Athens and certain members of her confederacy have survived, from which it would seem that while the σύμμαχοι were left with a limited civil jurisdiction of their own, criminal cases were transferred to the Athenian courts. Thus the Erythraean Decree (I.G. i2. 10 ff.) enacts that all cases of treason involving capital punishment shall be tried at Athens, the Chalcidian Decree (I.G. i2. 39) that cases arising from the εὔθυναι of a magistrate and involving exile, death, or ἀτιμία, shall likewise be tried at Athens, while the Milesian Decree (I.G. i2. 22) allows the local courts a jurisdiction extending only to cases which do not involve a penalty of more than 100 drachmas. It should be borne in mind, however, that although the trial of Euxitheus himself took place at Athens, the choice of such a forum was not necessarily determined by a similar decree transferring the criminal jurisdiction of the Mytilenean courts to Athens. Such a decree doubtless existed; but those which have survived appear to envisage only those cases in which the parties were both members of a subject-state, and it is very probable, though nowhere explicitly stated, that Herodes was not a native Lesbian, but an Athenian citizen resident in Lesbos as a cleruch. If so, there is nothing to prevent our supposing that the trial would have taken place in Athens in any event. You thought fit to let the present court decide the merits of his statements; but you pass judgement on his acts yourselves.

Why, even slaves who have murdered their masters and been caught red-handed are not put to death by the victim’s own relatives; they are handed over to the authorities as the ancient laws of your country ordain. If it is a fact that a slave is allowed to give evidence that a free man is guilty of murder, if a master can seek vengeance for the murder of his slave, should he see fit, and if a court can sentence the murderer of a slave as effectively as it can the murderer of a free man,i.e., (1) The slave could have been cited as a witness in court. (2) It is a criminal offence to put to death a slave belonging to someone else. (3) Anyone who commits such an act can be prosecuted for murder. (2) is of course a deliberate distortion of the facts, as the slave in question had become the property of the prosecution by purchase (cf. 47); and with it (3) loses its force. it follows that the slave in question should have had a public trial, instead of being put to death by you without a hearing. Thus it is you who deserve to be on trial far rather than I, who am being accused this day so undeservedly.

And now, gentlemen, consider further the statements of the two witnesses tortured. What are the fair and reasonable conclusions to be drawn from them? The slave gave two accounts: at one time he maintained that I was guilty, at another that I was not.

On the other hand, in spite of similar torture, the free man has not even yet said anything to damage me. He could not be influenced by offers of freedom, as his companion had been; and at the same time he was determined to cling to the truth, cost what it might. Of course, as far as his own advantage was concerned, he knew, like the other, that the torture would be over as soon as he corroborated the prosecution. Which, then, have we more reason to believe: the witness who firmly adhered to the same statement throughout, or the witness who affirmed a thing at one moment, and denied it at the next? Why, quite apart from the torture employed, those who consistently keep to one statement about one set of facts are more to be trusted than those who contradict themselves.