The Tyrannicide (4-5)

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.

The young man conceded the honour to him by right of age and abstained from the name of sovereignty, but only from that; he was the substance and the mainspring of the tyranny. He gave the government its assurance and security, and he alone reaped the profit of its crimes. It was he who kept their guardsmen together, who maintained their defences in strength, who terrorised their subjects and extirpated conspirators; it was he who plucked lads from their homes, who made a mockery of marriages; it was for him that maids were carried off; and whatever deeds of blood there were, whatever banishments, confiscations of property, applications of torture, and outrages—all these were a young man’s emprises. The old man followed him and shared his

wrongdoing, and had but praise for his son’s misdeeds. So the thing became unendurable to us; for when the desires of the will acquire the licence of sovereignty, they recognise no limit to wrongdoing.