On the Property of Aristophanes (51-55)

and he was ready to show his accounts. Just imagine what the position would have been if, after all the Athenians had been told that Diotimus had forty talents, something had then happened to him before he reached our shores. His relatives would then have been in the gravest danger, if they had been obliged to defend themselves against that monstrous slander without any knowledge of the facts of the case. So, for your being deceived in many people even now, and indeed for the ruin that some have unjustly incurred, you have to thank those who make light of telling lies and are bent on bringing malicious charges against their fellows.

For I suppose you know that Alcibiades held command for four or five years[*] in succession, keeping the upper hand and winning victories over the Lacedaemonians: the cities thought well to give him twice as much as any other commander, so that some people supposed that he had more than a hundred talents. But when he died[*] he left evidence that this was not true: for he bequeathed a smaller fortune to his children than he had inherited himself from his guardians.

Ah, by the Olympian gods, gentlemen, choose rather to deliver us with justice than to ruin us with injustice; and believe that those men speak the truth who, though keeping silent, show themselves throughout their lives self-respecting and just.