The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

since legal
punishment and chastisement are the proper cure. Or again, the man
who has suffered wrong may have inflicted some fearful punishment
on himself; then the doer of the wrong ought in justice to receive
a still more fearful punishment. Thus Sophocles, when pleading for
retribution to Euctemon, who had cut his own throat because of the
outrage done to him, said he would not fix a penalty less than the
victim had fixed for himself. Again, a man’s crime is worse if he
has been the first man, or the only man, or almost the only man, to
commit it: or if it is by no means the first time he has gone
seriously wrong in the same way: or if his crime has led to the
thinking-out and invention of measures to prevent and punish
similar crimes-thus in Argos a penalty is inflicted on a man on
whose account a law is passed, and also on those on whose account
the prison was built: or if a crime is specially brutal, or
specially deliberate: or if the report of it awakes more terror
than pity. There are also such rhetorically effective ways of
putting it as the following: That the accused has disregarded and
broken not one but many solemn obligations like oaths, promises,
pledges, or rights of intermarriage between states-here the crime
is worse because it consists of many crimes; and that the crime was
committed in the very place where criminals are punished, as for
example perjurers do-it is argued that a man who will commit a
crime in a law-court would commit it anywhere. Further, the worse
deed is that which involves the doer in special shame; that whereby
a man wrongs his benefactors-for he does more than one wrong, by
not merely doing them harm but failing to do them good; that which
breaks the unwritten laws of justice-the better sort of man will be
just without being forced to be so, and the written laws depend on
force while the unwritten ones do not. It may however be argued
otherwise, that the crime is worse which breaks the written laws:
for the man who commits crimes for which terrible penalties are
provided will not hesitate over crimes for which no penalty is
provided at all.-So much, then, for the comparative badness of
criminal actions.
15
    There are also the so-called ‘non-technical’ means of
persuasion; and we must now take a cursory view of these, since
they are specially characteristic of forensic oratory. They are
five in number: laws, witnesses, contracts, tortures, oaths.
    First, then, let us take laws and see how they are to be used in
persuasion and dissuasion, in accusation and defence. If the
written law tells against our case, clearly we must appeal to the
universal law, and insist on its greater equity and justice. We
must argue that the juror’s oath ‘I will give my verdict according
to honest opinion’ means that one will not simply follow the letter
of the written law. We must urge that the principles of equity are
permanent and changeless, and that the universal law does not
change either, for it is the law of nature, whereas written laws
often do change. This is the bearing the lines in Sophocles’
Antigone, where Antigone pleads that in burying her brother she had
broken Creon’s law, but not the unwritten law:
Not of to-day or yesterday they are,
But live eternal: (none can date their birth.)
Not I would fear the wrath of any man
(And brave God’s vengeance) for defying these.
    We shall argue that justice indeed is true and profitable, but
that sham justice is not, and that consequently the written law is
not, because it does not fulfil the true purpose of law. Or that
justice is like silver, and must be assayed by the judges, if the
genuine is to be distinguished from the counterfeit. Or that the
better a man is, the more he will follow and abide by the unwritten
law in preference to the written. Or perhaps that the law in
question contradicts some other highly-esteemed law, or even
contradicts itself. Thus it may be that one law will enact that all
contracts must be held binding, while another forbids us ever to
make illegal contracts. Or if a law is ambiguous, we shall turn it
about and consider which construction best fits the interests of
justice or utility, and then follow that way of looking at it. Or
if, though the law still exists, the situation to meet which it was
passed exists no longer, we must do our best to prove this and to
combat the law thereby. If however the written law supports our
case, we must urge that the oath ‘to give my verdict according to
my