He did not dispute it, gentlemen. He admitted his guilt, he begged and pleaded not to be killed, and he was ready to pay money in compensation. But I did not accept his proposal. I reckoned that the law of the city should have greater authority; and I exacted from him the penalty that you yourselves, believing it to be just, have established for people who behave like that.

Will my witnesses to these facts please come forward.

[WITNESSES]

Read me this law also, the one from the inscribed stone on the Areopagus.2

[LAW]

You hear, gentlemen, how the court of the Areopagus (to which the ancestral right of judging homicide cases belongs, as has been reaffirmed in our own days) has expressly decreed that a man is not to be convicted of homicide if he captures an adulterer in bed with his wife and exacts this penalty from him. Indeed, the lawgiver was so convinced that this is appropriate in the case of married women that he has established the same penalty in the case of concubines, who are less valuable. Clearly if he had had a more severe penalty available in the case of married women, he would have imposed it; but in fact he was unable to find a more powerful sanction than death to use in their case, so he decided the penalty should be the same as in the case of concubines.

Read me this law as well.

[LAW]

You hear, gentlemen: if anybody indecently assaults a free man or boy, he shall pay twice the damages; if he assaults a woman (in those categories where the death sentence is applicable), he shall be liable to the same penalty. Clearly therefore, gentlemen, the lawgiver believed that those who commit rape deserve a lighter penalty than those who seduce: he condemned seducers to death, but for rapists he laid down double damages. He believed that those who act by violence are hated by the people they have assaulted, whereas those who seduce corrupt the minds of their victims in such a way that they make other people’s wives into members of their own families rather than of their husbands’. The victim’s whole household becomes the adulterer’s, and as for the children, it is unclear whose they are, the husband’s or the seducer’s. Because of this the lawgiver laid down the death penalty for them.