[13] For you cannot even say that I did it at haphazard, and that a result followed which chanced to be beneficial, without my having intended it. What else did I fear after the stronger was slain, and why did I leave the sword in my victim if I did not absolutely prefigure exactly what would come to pass! You have no answer, unless you maintain that the dead man was not a tyrant and did not have that name; and that the city would not have been glad to make many presents on his account if he should lose his life. But you cannot say so.
Can it be that, now the tyrant has been slain, you are going to refuse the reward to the man who caused his death? What pettiness! Does it concern you how he died, as long as you enjoy your liberty? Do you demand any greater boon of the man who gave back your democracy? “But the law,” you say, “‘scrutinises only the main point in the facts of the case, ignoring all the incidentals and raising no further question!” What! was there not once a man who obtained the guerdon of a tyrannicide by just driving a tyrant into exile?
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Quite rightly, too; for he bestowed liberty in exchange for slavery. But what I have wrought is not exile, or expectation of a second uprising, but complete abolition, extinction of the entire line, extirpation, root and branch, of the whole menace.
Tyrannicida. Lucian of Samosata. Austin Morris Harmon (Translator). United States. Perseus 5.0.
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