For Polystratus (6-10)

This man, first of all, as a magistrate in Oropus,[*] neither betrayed you nor set up a new constitution when everyone else in office utterly betrayed their trust. They did not stay for the reckoning, thus convicting themselves of guilt; whereas he, feeling himself innocent, comes up for punishment!

The guilty are smuggled out by their accusers in return for payment; but those from whom they can get no profit they expose as guilty. They make similar accusations against those who have proposed some motion in the Council and against those who have not. But this man has not even proposed one motion regarding your people;

and I presume that these persons deserve no ill-treatment at your hands on the ground that, while they were loyal to you, they did not incur the enmity of that party.[*] For those who spoke in opposition to them were either exiled or put to death, so that whoever did aspire to oppose them in your interest was invariably deterred by fright or by the slaughter of their victims.

Hence in most cases they completely lost heart, since those who were not banished were executed. Those among them who engaged to obey and refrain from plotting and reporting, they placed in power. Thus a change of government would have been no easy thing for you. It is not fair, then, to punish people for matters in which they showed their loyalty to you.

And I consider it monstrous that the same treatment meted out to those who proposed measures concerning your people that were not to its highest advantage should also be applied to the man who proposed nothing, and who in seventy years has committed no offence against you, let alone eight days! Those who spent their whole lives in knavery have appeared as honest men before the auditors, because they have tampered with their accusers; while those who were always honest towards you—they are the knaves.