Accusation of Calumny (6-10)

You ought to have refrained either from defaming him or from associating with him, and that by an open renunciation of his company. But if you felt that to be dishonorable, how was it dishonorable for you to associate with a man whom you did not even feel it honorable to renounce?

And, mark you, I for my part have discovered no ground on which you could reasonably have despised my company. For neither could I see that you were very clever and myself very stupid, nor indeed that you were surrounded with friends and myself destitute of them, nor again that you were wealthy and I poor, nor again that you were in particularly good repute and myself in ill odor, nor were my interests in danger and yours in safety. What reasonable ground, then, had I for suspecting that you were annoyed by my association with you?

Moreover, when you made these statements to our newest members, you did not expect that they would report them to us, and there you were, supposing it a fine stroke of cleverness to go round accusing yourselves to everyone of consenting to be in the company of evil men!

In the second place, I should do wrong to deal with him as he did with you. For he had not the same view in reporting it to me as you had in making it to him. He reported it to my relatives out of kindness to me, but you made it to him with the intention of injuring me. And if I disbelieved his words, I should seek to test them:

as it is, they tally with the former reports, and I find in them corroboration of those, as those amply corroborated them. So, first of all, dealing entirely through you with Hegemachus about the deposit of the horse, I wished to cancel the transaction as the horse was in a sickly state: Diodorus here tried to dissuade me, asserting that Polycles would make no objection to refunding the twelve minae. So he said at the time; but after the death of the horse he ranged himself in the end with these men as my opponent, saying that I had no right to recover the money.