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[3] Now the prosecution allege that it is very difficult to prove my guilt because of my astuteness. Yet in maintaining that my actions themselves prove me to be the criminal, they are assuming me to be a simpleton. For if the bitterness of my feud is a natural ground for your deeming me guilty today, it was still more natural for me to foresee before committing the crime that suspicion would settle upon me as it has done. I was more likely to go to the length of stopping anyone else whom I knew to be plotting the murder than deliberately to incur certain suspicion by committing it myself; for if, on the one hand, the crime in itself showed that I was the murderer,1 I was doomed; while if, on the other hand, I escaped detection, I knew very well that suspicion would fall on me as it has done.
1 Or possibly: “If on the one hand I was detected in the act of committing the crime. . . ” The speaker is endeavoring to prove that he did not commit the murder by showing that his knowledge of the consequences to himself, even in the event of his escaping detection, must necessarily have deterred him. The sentence must therefore be regarded as explaining not the whole of that preceding, but only αὐτὸν . . . ἐμπεσεῖν.
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