Accusation of Calumny (16-20)

Such were the pretexts that you clearly invented then from my association with Thrasymachus; but now that pretexts have failed you, in more straightforward oppression you show that you stop at nothing. I ought indeed to have understood then that this fate was in store for me, when you were actually defaming to me your own members; and then I have told you my whole opinion of Polycles, whom you are now supporting.

What can have made me so incautious? It was a fatuous lapse in me. I thought I was a friend of yours who was exempt from all defamation for the very reason that you defamed the others to me, since I held a pledge from each of you,—your malicious statements about one another.

Or, as my well-wishers, will you speak the best you can about me? Why, today you are the only persons who speak ill of me! Well, for my part I shall not hinder you. And this is what will happen to you among yourselves, since it is your habit to be ever injuring one of your associates in speech and in act; when I have left your association, you will turn against yourselves; then you will conceive a hatred of each one of your number in turn; and finally the last one left will defame himself.

And my advantage will be at least this,—that, by being the first to rid myself of you now, I shall suffer the least injury at your hands: for you injure both in speech and in act the people who have to do with you, but never a single one of those who have not.