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I am married to their sister, a child of Diogeiton’s daughter; and after many appeals I at first prevailed on both parties to submit the case to the arbitration of their friends, as I held it most desirable that their affairs should not be known to anyone else. But since Diogeiton would not allow himself to be advised by any of his own friends regarding the property which he was plainly convicted of holding, but preferred to be prosecuted, to sue against the validity of judgements, and to encounter the utmost risks, rather than do the just thing which would relieve him of all their complaints, I entreat you,
if I prove that the guardianship of their grandfather has been conducted more disgracefully than any heretofore held in the city by persons who had no bond of relationship, to give them the support of justice: otherwise, believe this man entirely, and reprobate us henceforward. I will now try to inform you on the matter from the beginning.
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Some time later, when Diodotus was enrolled for infantry service, he summoned his wife, who was his niece, and her father, who was also his father-in-law and his brother, and grandfather and uncle of the little ones, as he felt that owing to these connections there was nobody more bound to act justly by his children: he then gave him a will and five talents of silver in deposit;
and he also produced an account of his loans on bottomry, amounting to seven talents and forty minae
Having made these arrangements and left duplicate deeds in his house, he went to serve abroad with Thrasyllus. He was killed at
When at length he informed them of the death, and they had done what is customary,
Seven years later the elder of the boys was certified to be of age
On hearing these words they went away, aghast and weeping, to their mother, and brought her along with them to me. It was pitiful to see how they suffered from the blow: the poor wretches, turned out of doors, wept aloud and besought me not to allow them to be deprived of their patrimony and reduced to beggary by the last persons who ought to have committed this outrage upon them, but to give my best aid, for their sister’s sake as well as their own.
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I went first and expressed my indignation to Hegemon, the husband of this man’s daughter; I then discussed the matter with the other relations; and I called upon this man to allow his handling of the money to be investigated. Diogeiton at first refused, but finally he was compelled by his friends. When we held our meeting, the mother asked him what heart he could have, that he thought fit to take such measures with the children, “when you are their father’s brother,” she said, “and my father, and their uncle and grandfather.
Even if you felt no shame before any man, you ought to have feared the gods. For you received from him, when he went on the expedition, five talents in deposit. I offer to swear to the truth of this on the lives of my children, both these and those since born to me, in any place
And she convicted him further of having recovered seven talents and four thousand drachmae of bottomry loans, and she produced the record of these; for she showed that in the course of his removal from Collytus
She also proved that he had recovered a hundred minae which had been lent at interest on land mortgages, besides two thousand drachmae and some furniture of great value; and that corn came in to them every year from the
And you thought fit to turn these, the children of your daughter, out of their own house, in worn-out clothes, without shoes or attendant or bedding or cloaks; without the furniture which their father bequeathed to them, and without the money which he had deposited with you.
And now you are bringing up the children you have had by my step-mother in all the comforts of affluence; and you are quite right in that: but you are wronging mine, whom you ejected from the house in dishonor, and whom you are intent on turning from persons of ample means into beggars. And over proceedings of this sort you feel neither fear of the gods nor shame before me who am cognizant of the facts, nor are you mindful of your brother, but you put money before us all.”
Thereupon, gentlemen of the jury, after hearing all the severe things spoken by the mother, the whole company of us there were so affected by this man’s conduct and by her statements,—when we saw how the children had been treated, and recalled the dead man to mind and how unworthy was the guardian he had left in charge of his estate, and reflected how hard it is to find a person who can be trusted with one’s affairs,—that nobody, gentlemen, among us there was able to utter a word: we could only weep as sadly as the sufferers, and go our ways in silence.
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since he has had the face to deny one part of his debt and, after finally confessing to the rest, to make out a sum of seven talents of silver and seven thousand drachmae as receipts and expenses on account of two boys and their sister during eight years. So gross is his impudence that, not knowing how he should enter the sums spent, he reckoned for the viands of the two young boys and their sister five obols a day
For the father’s tomb, though he did not spend twenty-five minae of the five thousand drachmae shown, he charges half this sum to himself, and has entered half against them.
Then for the other festivals and sacrifices he charged to their account an expenditure of more than four thousand drachmae; and he added a multitude of things which he counted in to make up his total, as though he had been named in the will as guardian of the children merely in order that he might show them accounts instead of money, and reduce them from wealth to utter poverty, and that they might forget whatever ancestral enemy they might have to wage war on their guardian for stripping them of their patrimony!
But yet, had he wished to act justly by the children, he was free to act in accordance with the laws which deal with orphans for the guidance of incapable as well as capable guardians: he might have farmed out the estate and so got rid of a load of cares, or have purchased land and used the income for the children’s support; whichever course he had taken, they would have been as rich as anyone in
Most monstrous of all, gentlemen of the jury, he asserts that in sharing with Alexis, son of Aristodicus, the service of equipping a warship, he paid a contribution of forty-eight minae, and has entered half of this against these orphan children, whom the State has not only exempted during their childhood, but has freed from all public services for a year after they have been certified to be of age. Yet he, their grandfather, illegally exacts from his daughter’s children one half of his expenses in equipping a warship!
Again, he dispatched to the Adriatic a cargo of two talents’ value, and told their mother, at the moment of its sailing, that it was at the risk of the children
To set the reckoning before you in detail, gentlemen of the jury, would be a lengthy affair; but when with some trouble I had got him to hand over the balance-sheet, in the presence of witnesses I asked Aristodicus, brother of Alexis,—the latter being now dead—whether he had the account for the equipment of a warship. He told me that he had, and we went to his house and found that Diogeiton had paid Alexis a contribution of twenty-four minae towards equipping the warship.
But the expenditure that he showed was forty-eight minae, so that the children have been charged exactly the total of what he has spent.
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For eight years, that amounts to eight thousand drachmae; and we are left with a balance of six talents and twenty minae. For he will not be able to show that he has either had losses by pirates, or met with failure or paid off debts.
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But he, when he had crushed despotism and arrested outrage, founded a contest of bodily strength, a challenge of wealth, and a display of intelligence in the fairest part of
The project of it, then, was his; and so I have not come here to talk trivialities or to wrangle over words: I take that to be the business of utterly futile professors in straits for a livelihood; but I think it behoves a man of principle and civic worth to be giving his counsel on the weightiest questions, when I see
Now if these afflictions were due to weakness, it would be necessary to acquiesce in our fate: but since they are due to faction and mutual rivalry, surely we ought to desist from the one and arrest the other, knowing that, if rivalry befits the prosperous, the most prudent views befit people in a position like ours.
For we see both the gravity of our dangers and their imminence on every side: you are aware that empire is for those who command the sea, that the King
We ought therefore to relinquish our mutual warfare, and with a single purpose in our hearts to secure our salvation; to feel shame for past events and fear for those that lie in the future, and to compete with our ancestors, by whom the foreigner, in grasping at the land of others, was deprived of his own, and who expelled the despots and established freedom for all in common.
But I wonder at the Lacedaemonians most of all: what can be their policy in tolerating the devastation of
Now the future will bring no better opportunity than the present. We ought to view the disasters of those who have been crushed, not as the concern of others, but as our own: let us not wait for the forces of both our foes to advance upon ourselves, but while there is yet time let us arrest their outrage.
For who would not be mortified to see how they have grown strong through our mutual warfare? Those incidents, no less awful than disgraceful, have empowered our dire oppressors to do what they have done, and have hindered the Greeks from taking vengeance for their wrongs.
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It is not at them that I wonder, but at you who listen to them, for being the most forgetful of mankind, or the readiest to suffer injury from such men as these; who shared by mere chance in the operations at the Peiraeus, but whose feelings were with the party of the town. What, I ask, was the object of returning from your exile, if by your votes you are to enslave yourselves?
Now I, men of
No, if you will be advised by me; nor, after losing our walls, shall we denude ourselves of our forces,—large numbers of our infantry, our cavalry and our archers: for, if you hold fast to these, you will make your democracy secure, will be more victorious over your enemies, and will be more useful to your allies. You are well aware that in the previous oligarchies of our time it was not the possessors of land who controlled the city: many of them were put to death, and many were expelled from the city;
and the people, after recalling them, restored your city to you, but did not venture to participate in it themselves. Thus, if you take my advice, you will not be depriving your benefactors, so far as you may, of their native land, nor be placing more confidence in words than in deeds, in the future than in the past, especially if you remember the champions of oligarchy, who in speech make war on the people,
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For I believe that if I can persuade you, the danger will be common to both sides
For their enemies know that, often as they may invade the territories of these peoples, as often will they march out to oppose them under arms, so that they see no glory in the venture: if they should be victorious, they could not enslave them, and if they should be defeated, they must deprive themselves of the advantages that they already possess. The more they prosper, the less is their appetite for risk.
We also, men of
But surely we ought to remember that heretofore, when we have gone to the support of others who were victims of injury, we have set up many a trophy over our foes on alien soil, and so ought now to act as valiant defenders of our country and of ourselves: let us trust in the gods, and hope that they will stand for justice on the side of the injured.
Strange indeed would it be, men of