History of Rome

​After Perseus made an end of speaking, the eyes of those who were present were cast upon Demetrius, as if he were about to reply immediately.

​Then there was silence for a long time, since it was apparent to all that, bathed in tears, he was unable to speak. At last, necessity itself overcame his grief, as they ordered him to speak, and thus he began.

”All the aids, father, which formerly belonged to the accused, the accuser has preempted. By simulated tears for the destruction of another, he has made my true tears suspected by you.

​While he himself, ever since I returned from Rome, plots through secret conversations with his associates day and night, he additionally puts upon me the appearance not only of a plotter but of a manifest robber and assassin.

​He terrifies you with his own danger, so that through you, the very same person, he may hasten destruction for his innocent brother. He says that there is no refuge for him anywhere in the world, so that I may not have any hope remaining even with you.

​He burdens me, cornered, alone, and helpless, with the envy of foreign favor, which harms rather than helps. Now how like an accuser is that indeed, that he has mixed the crime of this night with the rest of the persecution of my life, ​so that he might both make this charge, the nature of which you will soon know, suspected because of the other course of my life, and support that empty accusation regarding my hopes, desires, and plans with this night’s fabricated and composed argument?

​At the same time he also sought that the accusation might seem sudden and least prepared, as having indeed arisen from the fear and sudden tumult of this night.

​But it would have been proper, Perseus, if I was a traitor to my father and the kingdom, if I had entered into plans with the Romans, if with other enemies of my father, that this night’s story should not have been waited for, but that I should have been accused of treason before:

​if that accusation, separated from this one, was empty and destined to show your envy against me rather than my crime, today also it should either have been passed over or deferred to another time, ​so that it might be investigated by itself, whether I had laid plots for you, or you for me, with indeed a new and singular kind of hatred.

​I, however, as far as I am able in this sudden confusion, will separate those things which you have confused, and will lay open the plots of this night, whether they were yours or mine.

​He wants it to appear that I entered into a plan to kill him, so that indeed, by removing the elder brother, to whom by the law of nations, by the custom of the Macedonians, and also, as he says, by your judgment, the kingdom is to belong, I, the younger, might succeed to the place of him whom I had killed. What then does that other part of his speech mean, ​in which he says that the Romans were courted by me, and that through trust in them I have come into the hope of the kingdom?

​For if I both believed that there was so much power in the Romans that they could impose whomsoever they wished as king of Macedonia, and trusted so much in my favor among them, what need was there for fratricide?

​Or was it so that I might wear a diadem bloodied by a brother’s murder? So that I might be accursed and hated by those very people with whom, through either true or at least simulated integrity, I possess favor, if by chance I possess any?

​Unless you believe that Titus Quinctius, by whose nod and counsels you now accuse me of being ruled—though he himself lives in such affection with his brother—was my instigator to the murder of a brother.

​The same man has gathered together not only the favor of the Romans, but the judgments of the Macedonians and the consent of almost all gods and men, through all of which he believed that he would not be my equal in the contest.

​Yet the same man, as though I were inferior in all other things, accuses me of having fled to crime as my last hope.

​Do you wish this to be the formula of the trial, that whichever of us feared lest the other should seem more worthy of the kingdom, he should be judged to have formed the plan of destroying his brother?”