Defense Against a Charge of Subverting the Democracy (26-30)

For they prevailed on you to condemn several men to death without trial, to confiscate unjustly the property of many more, and to banish and disfranchise other citizens; since they were capable of taking money for the release of offenders, and of appearing before you to effect the ruin of the innocent. They did not stop until they had involved the city in seditions and the gravest disasters, while raising themselves from poverty to wealth.

But your temper moved you to welcome back the exiles, to reinstate the disfranchised in their rights, and to bind yourselves by oaths to concord with the rest. At the end of it all, you would have been more pleased to punish those who traded in slander under the democracy than those who held office under the oligarchy. And with good reason, gentlemen: for it is manifest now to all that the unjust acts of rulers in an oligarchy produce democracy, whereas the trade of slanderers in the democracy has twice led to the establishment of oligarchy. It is not right, therefore, to hearken many times to the counsels of men whose advice has not even once resulted in your profit.

For these are the men whom you would be far more justified in trusting than those who, as exiles, owed their deliverance to others and, now that they have returned, are taking up the slanderer’s trade. In my opinion, gentlemen of the jury, those among our people remaining in the city who shared my views have clearly proved, both under oligarchy and under democracy, what manner of citizens they are.

But the men who give us good cause to wonder what they would have done if they had been allowed to join the Thirty are the men who now, in a democracy, imitate those rulers; who have made a rapid advance from poverty to wealth, and who hold a number of offices without rendering an account of any; who instead of concord have created mutual suspicion, and who have declared war instead of peace; and who have caused us to be distrusted by the Greeks.