How you, men of Athens,
have been affected by my accusers,
I do not know;
but I, for my part,
almost forgot my own identity,
so persuasively did they talk;
and yet there is hardly a word of truth
in what they have said.
But I was most amazed by one
of the many lies that they told
when they said
that you must be on your guard
not to be deceived by me,
because I was a clever speaker.
For, they are not ashamed
that they shall immediately
be convicted by me of falsehood by the fact when I'll
show myself to be not in the least a clever speaker,
this, I thought of them
to be the most shameless;
unless indeed
they call him a clever speaker
who speaks the truth;
for if this is what they mean,
I would agree that I
– not after their fashion –
am an orator.
Now they, as I say, have said little or nothing true;
but you shall hear from me nothing but the truth.
Not, however, men of Athens,
speeches finely tricked out
as theirs are,
nor carefully arranged with words and phrases,
but you will hear things said
at random with the words that happen to occur to me.
For I trust that what I say is just;
and let none of you expect otherwise.
For surely it would not be proper, gentlemen,
for someone of my age to come
before you like a youngster making up speeches.
And, men of Athens,
I urgently beg and beseech you
if you hear me making my defence with the same words
with which I have been accustomed to speak
both in the market place at the bankers tables,
where many of you have heard me, and elsewhere,
not to be surprised
or to make a disturbance on this account.
For the fact is that
this is the first time I have come before the court,
although I am seventy years old;
I am therefore an utter foreigner to the manner of speech here.
Hence, just as you would, of course,
if I were really a foreigner,
pardon me if I spoke in that dialect and that manner
in which I had been brought up,
so now I make this request of you, a fair one,
as it seems to me,
that you disregard the manner of my speech
-for perhaps it might be worse and perhaps better-
and observe and pay attention merely to this,
whether what I say is just or not;
for that is the virtue of a judge,
and an orator’s virtue is
to speak the truth.
