על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ד ב׳On the Special Laws, Book IV 2
א׳
1[7] If anyone crazed with a passion for other people’s property sets himself to take it by theft and, because he cannot easily manage it by stealth, breaks into a house during the night, using the darkness to cloak his criminal doings, he may, if caught in the act before sunrise, be slain by the householder in the very place where he has broken in. Though actually engaged on the primary but minor crime of theft he is intending the major though secondary crime of murder, since he is prepared if prevented by anyone to defend himself with the iron burglar’s tools which he carries and other weapons. But if the sun has risen the case is different; he must not be killed off hand but taken before magistrates and judges to pay such penalties as they prescribe.
ב׳
2[8] For in the night time when rulers and ordinary citizens alike are settled down at home and retiring to rest, the aggrieved person cannot seek out any one to succour him, and therefore he must take the punishment into his own hands, as the occasion appoints him to be magistrate and judge.
ג׳
3[9] In the day time however law courts and council chambers stand wide open and there are plenty of people to help him in the city, some of them elected to maintain the laws, others who without such election are so moved by their hatred of evil that they need none to bid them to take the rôle of championing the injured. Before these must the thief be brought, for in this way the owner will escape the charges of wilfulness and recklessness and show that he protects himself in the spirit of true democracy.
ד׳
4[10] And if the sun is above the horizon he must be held guilty if he anticipates justice by killing him off hand. He has preferred angry passion to reason and subordinated the law to his personal desire for vengeance. “My friend,” I would say to him, “do not because you have been wronged by a thief in the night time commit in daylight a more grievous theft, in which the spoil is not money but the principles of justice, on which the ordering of the commonwealth is based.”