Against Theomnestus 2 (6-10)

Nor, if someone abducted a child, would you accept him as a kidnapper. Now you have yourself taken proceedings for slander against the person who said you had cast your shield: yet it is not so written in the law, but the phrase is saying a man has thrown it away. How monstrous, then, that if such a thing is said about you, you should make play with the laws in the way I am doing now, and should be avenged on your enemies; but if you say such a thing yourself, you should claim to escape punishment!

I ask you, therefore, gentlemen, to protect me, reflecting that it is a greater injury to be accused of killing one’s father than of having cast one’s shield. I, for one, would rather admit to having thrown away any number than to entertaining such thoughts regarding my father. Yet I have seen this man acting in the way that you know, while I myself saved my shield. So on what ground should I fail to get redress from him?

What imputation stands against me? That I have been justly accused? No, not even yourselves can say so. That the defendant is a better man? No, not even himself can claim this. That having thrown away my arms I am suing a man who saved his? This is not the story that has been dispersed over the city.

Do not, then, pity him for obloquy that he deserves, nor forgive him for outrages and expressions whereby he has broken the laws, especially in regard to a man[*] who has held many generalships and shared many of your perils; who has neither fallen into the hands of the enemy nor been convicted by you at the audit of his service, and who at the age of seventy lost his life under the oligarchy for loyalty to you. There is good cause to feel anger on his account:

for what more distressing repute could he have than this,—after being slain by his enemies to bear the reproach of having been destroyed by his children? The memorials of his valor are hanging in your temples, while those of these people’s baseness are seen in the temples of the enemy.