A man went to the Acropolis to slay the tyrant. He did not find him, but slew his son and left his sword in the body. When the tyrant came and saw his son already dead, he slew himself with the same sword. The man who went up and slew the tyrant’s son claims the reward for slaying the tyrant.

Two tyrants, gentlemen of the jury,

The form of procedure posited is analogous to dokimasia at Athens. The claimant’s right to the reward offered by the state has been challenged by one of his fellow-citizens, and the authorities have referred the question to a jury. The adversary, as plaintiff, has already spoken.

have been done to death by me in a single day, one already past his prime, the other in the ripeness of his years and in better case to take up wrongdoing in his turn. Yet I have come to claim but one reward for both, as the only tyrant-slayer of all time who has done away with two malefactors at a single blow, killing the son with the sword and the father by means of his affection for his son. The tyrant has paid us a sufficient penalty for what he did, for while he still lived he saw his son, prematurely slain, in the toils of death, and at last (a thing incomparably strange) he himself was constrained to become his own executioner. And his son not only met death at my hands, but even after death assisted me to slay another; for though while he still lived he shared his father’s crimes, after his death he slew his father as best he might.

It was I, then, who put an end to the tyranny, and the sword that accomplished everything was mine. But I inverted the order of executions, and made an innovation in the method of putting criminals to death, for I myself destroyed the stronger, the one capable of self-defence, and resigned the old man to my unaided sword.

It was my thought, therefore, that I should get for this a still more generous gift from you, and should receive rewards to match the number of the slain, because I had freed you not only from your present ills, but from your expectation of those that were to come, and had accorded you established liberty, since no successor in wrongdoing had been left alive. But now there is danger that after all these achievements I may come away from you unrewarded and may be the only one to be excluded from the recompense afforded by those laws which I maintained.

My adversary here seems to me to be taking this course, not, as he says, because of his concern for the interests of the state, but because of his grief over the dead men, and in the endeavour to avenge them upon the man who caused their death.

On your part, however, gentlemen of the jury, bear with me for a moment while I recount the history of their tyranny, although you know it well; for then you can appreciate the greatness of my benefaction and you yourselves will be more exultant, thinking of all that you have escaped.

It is not as it has often before been with others; it is not a simple tyranny and a single slavery that we have endured, nor a single master’s caprice that we have borne. Nay, of all those who have ever experienced such adversity we alone had two masters instead of one and were torn asunder, unlucky folk! between two sets of wrongs. The elder man was more moderate by far, less acrimonious in his fits of anger, less hasty in his punishments, and less headlong in his desires, because by now his age was staying the excessive violence of his impulses and curbing his appetite for pleasures. It was said, indeed, that he was reluctantly impelled to begin his wrongdoings by his son, since he himself was not at all tyrannical but yielded to the other. For he was excessively devoted to his children, as he has shown, and his son was all the world to him; so he gave way to him, did the wrongs that he bade, punished the men whom he designated, served him in all things, and in a word was tyrannised by him, and was mere minister to his son’s desires.