[20]
The injustice of these men only caused me a moderate annoyance, as I considered it ordained that one should harm one's enemies and serve one's friends;1 but to be derived of justice at your hands would cause me a far deeper distress. For it will be thought that my evil plight is due, not to enmity, but to an evil condition of the State.
1 This doctrine was accepted by Greek thought as part of the fixed order of things: it appears in Hes. WD 351, Pind. P. 2.83, and a saying of Simonides to this effect is taken by Plato as the starting-point of his discussion of justice in Plat. Rep. 1.332.
Lysias. Lysias with an English translation by W.R.M. Lamb, M.A. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1930.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.