On A Wound By Premeditation (6-10)

Furthermore, everyone of you is aware that he would have been killed more quickly by the stroke of a dagger than by the blow of a fist. Now, you find that not even he accuses us of having come with anything like that in our hands; he only says he was struck by a potsherd. Why, it is evident already from what he has said that there has been no premeditation.

For we should not have gone in that way, when it was uncertain whether we should find in his house a potsherd or something to serve for killing him, but should have brought it from home as we set out. In point of fact, we admit that we went to see boys and flute-girls and were in liquor: so how is that premeditation?

In no wise, to my thinking. But this man takes his love-sickness in an opposite fashion to the rest of us: he wants to have it both ways—to avoid paying up the money[*] and to have the woman as well. And then, with his passion inflamed by the woman, he is excessively hasty of hand and the worse for liquor, and one is forced to defend oneself. As to her, sometimes it is I, and sometimes he, for whom she professes affection, wishing to be loved by both.

Now I have shown an easy temper from the beginning, as I still do to-day; but he has got into such an irritable state that he is not ashamed to call a black eye a wound, and to be carried about in a litter and pretend to be in a dreadful condition, for the sake of a harlot wench whom he is free to leave uncontested on restoring the money to me.

And he says that he has been plotted against in a monstrous way, and contests every point with us; yet although it was open to him to procure his proof by having the woman tortured,[*] he refused. She would first have informed you whether she was shared by us or belonged only to him, whether I contributed half the money or he gave it all, and whether we had been reconciled or were still enemies;