‘9. My first point is this: Contrary to all precedent at Athens, though I am on trial for murder, I was indicted for “criminal violence.” Now my enemies themselves have testified that I neither belong to the class of “violent criminals,” nor am subject to the law which covers such cases. It applies to such offences as stealing and highway robbery, and they have shown that no such charge can attach to me.
‘Thus their conduct in the matter of my summary arrest has made it in the highest degree legal and just for you to acquit me.
‘10. They say, indeed, that the taking of life is in itself an aggravated form of “criminal violence.” I admit that it is a most serious kind, and so is sacrilege or treason; but you have laws which deal with each of these charges specifically.
‘And, to begin with, they have brought me to trial in the Agora, the very place which a defendant in a charge of murder is ordinarily warned to avoid; secondly, they have proposed a penalty of their own choosing, whereas the law ordains that the man who has taken another’s life shall lose his own in return.
‘This they have done, not for my benefit, but for their own convenience, and herein they have failed in that respect for the dead which the law prescribes.
‘11. Again, as I imagine you all know, all the courts concerned with murder trials sit in the open air, with this particular object, that the jurors may not have to enter the same building with those who have blood on their hands, and that the prosecutor in a trial for murder may not find himself under the same roof with him who committed the act.
‘But you, Sir, have acted contrary to all precedent in transgressing this law; and not only this: It was incumbent on you to take the most solemn and binding oath, to invoke destruction upon yourself and your family and your house if you failed in its conditions, namely, that you would not bring any charges against me except such as referred to the murder and my complicity in it.
‘Had this obligation been observed, however great crimes I had committed I could not be found guilty except in view of the one fact of blood-guiltiness, and on the other hand, however many good deeds I had to my credit, these good deeds could not save me.
‘12. All this regular procedure you have violated; you have invented laws for your own use; you who prosecute me have taken no oath; your witnesses who bear witness against me have taken none, though they ought first to take the same oath as yourself; they should lay their hands upon the sacrifice while they are bearing witness against me.