The Dead Come to Life, or the Fisherman (7-8)

PLATO

That speech of yours is good rhetoric, my fine fellow; but it is directly against your case and only makes your presumptuousness appear more staggering, since ingratitude is now added to injustice. For you got your shafts from us, as you admit, and then turned them against us, making it your only aim to speak ill of us all. That is the way you have paid us for opening that garden to you and not forbidding you to pick flowers and go away with your arms full. For that reason, then, above all else, you deserve to die.

FRANKNESS

See! You give me an angry-hearing, and you reject every just plea! Yet I should never have supposed that anger could affect. Plato or Chrysippus or Aristotle or the rest of you; it seemed to me that

you, and you alone, were surely far away from anything of that kind. But, however that may be, my masters, do not put me to death unsentenced and unheard. This too was once a trait of yours, not to deal with fellow-citizens on a basis of force and superior strength, but to settle your differences by course of law, according, a hearing and in your turn receiving one. So let us choose a judge, and then you may bring your complaint either jointly or through anyone whom you may elect to represent you all; and I will defend.myself against your charges. Then, if I am proven guilty, and the court passes that verdict upon me, I will submit, of course, to the punishment that I deserve, and you will not have taken it upon yourselves to do anything high-handed. But if after I have undergone my investigation I am found innocent and irreproachable, the jury will discharge me, and you will turn your anger against those who nave misled you and set you against me.