Kitap 7
2.6
Under this head come the virtues of piety, loyalty, self-control and the like. To these some add the rendering of like for like. But this view must not be adopted without consideration: for to retaliate, or meet violence with violence on the one hand, does not imply injustice on the part of the aggressor, while on the other hand it does not follow that the first act was just merely because the two acts were alike. In cases where there is justice on both sides, the two parties must both come under the same law and the same conditions, and it would not perhaps be untrue to say that things can never be spoken of as like if there is any point in which they are dissimilar. Convention, on the other hand, is to be found in laws, customs, legal precedents and agreements.
2.7
There is another form of defence by which we defend an act in itself indefensible by arguments drawn from without. i. e. from motives derived from facts lying outside the actual case. This the Greeks call κατ᾽ ἀντίθεσιν by opposition. Here again there is no Latin equivalent, since we call it defence by assumption.
