personally-however wrong my father might have been in refusing to acknowledge you-I certainly am innocent. It was not my business to know who were his sons; it was for him to show me whom I was to regard as brothers. So long therefore as he forbore to acknowledge you, I also held you to be no relation: ever since he acknowledged you, I have regarded you as he did. What is the proof of this? You have had your portion of the inheritance after my father's death; you participate in our religious worship, in our civil rights; no one excludes you from these. What would you have? If he says he is cruelly treated, if he weeps and whines and accuses me, don't believe what he says; it is not right that you should, as the question is not about these matters now; but remember, that he may obtain justice quite as easily if he is called Bootus. Why are you so obstinately contentious? Do desist: do not cherish these malignant feelings towards me! I have none such towards you: nay, I must tell you, even now I am speaking more on your behalf than my own, when I insist that we should not have the same name. For whoever hears it pronounced must at all events ask, which of us is meant, if there are two persons called "Mantitheus son of Mantias:" then, if the person means you, he will reply-" the one whom Mantias was compelled to adopt." How can you desire this? Take and read, if you please, these two depositions, showing that my father gave to me the name of Mantitheus, and to the defendant that of Bootus. [The Depositions.] I have now to show you, I believe, men of the jury, not only that you will satisfy your oaths if you pronounce the verdict which I ask, but that by the confession of the defendant himself it appears, that he ought to be called Bootus and not Mantitheus. For, after I had commenced this action against him as Bootus son of Mantias of Thoricus, at first he defended the action, and put in an affidavit for delay, as if he was Bootus, but at last, when evasion became no longer possible, he suffered an award to be given against him for non-appearance, and just see, by the Gods, what he did!he gets a rule to set aside the award for non-appearance, entitling himself Bootus. But, if he had really nothing to do with that name, he should in the first instance have allowed the suit to proceed to its termination against Bootus, and not afterwards have himself obtained a rule in that name to set aside the award. When he has thus by his own adjudication declared his name to be Bootus, what can he call upon you sworn jurors to decide? 1 To prove the truth of these statements, please to take the rule to set aside the award, and this plaint. [The rule to set aside the award. The plaint.] If now the defendant can produce a law, which empowers children to choose their own names, you will do right to pronounce the verdict which he asks: but if the law, which you all know as well as myself, authorises parents not only to give the name in the first instance, but also to cancel and publicly revoke it, if they please; and if I have proved that my father, who had such authority by the law, gave to the defendant the name of Bootus and to me that of Mantitheus; how is it competent for you to pronounce any other verdict than that which I ask? On questions, upon which there are no written laws, you are sworn to decide according to what is right and equitable; so that, even had there been no statute upon this point, you would have been bound to give your decision in For what Athenian ever gave favour. my the same name to two of his children? What Athenian, who is yet without children, ever will do so? then you consider in your judgment to be right for your own 1 Perhaps Bootus might have treated the summons to appear, and ali the subsequent proceedings against him in that name, as a nullity; just as a person may do in our country, who is sued in a wrong surname, by which he has never been known. On the other hand, as Boeotus had formerly passed by that name, and as this was a suit instituted for the very purpose of compelling him to keep that name, it might have been dangerous to treat the whole process as a nullity, for fear of his being concluded by the judgment. The safest course might have been to appear and defend the action, under protest that he was sued by the wrong name; and, for aught we know, this was the course that Bootus adopted. Schäfer pronounces the point to be a mere quibble. Such points however are frequently taken by lawyers; and a case like the present, for which perhaps the Attic law furnished no precedent, was likely enough to lead both to quibbles and to difficulties. See the following speech, page 1013 (orig.). and the argument to this. As to avriλngis see Volume III. pages 393, 394, 398. children, you are bound in conscience to decide in our case. It appears therefore, having regard to what is right and equitable, having regard to the statute laws, to your oaths, and to the defendant's own confession, that I, men of Athens, am asking you what is fair and reasonable, while the defendant asks what is not only unfair, but contrary to the practice of the country. THE ORATION AGAINST BOOTUS-II. OR, THE ORATION FOR THE DOWRY. THE ARGUMENT. THIS is the action brought by the same plaintiff against the same defendant to establish his title to the marriage portion of his mother. The circumstances which led to it have already been explained in the argument to the preceding oration, and need not be here repeated. As Boeotus disputed the fact of the plaintiff's mother having received a portion on her marriage, Mantitheus calls his maternal relations to prove it; and in answer to the counter-claim set up by Bootus for the portion of his mother Plangon, in support of which no direct testimony had been offered, he shows by the facts and probabilities of the case, that Plangon was portionless, and that the defendant's account of the matter is a fabrication. The decision of the arbitrator, which had not been appealed against, is insisted on by the plaintiff as affording a strong presumption in his favour. He enters, as in the previous case, into the topics of their family history, shows how ungratefully Bœotus had treated him, and appeals to the sympathies of the jury. Ir is the most grievous thing in the world, men of the jury, when any one is by name called brother of persons whom in reality he regards as enemies, and when, on account of cruel injuries which they have heaped upon him, he is compelled to come into a court of justice; as is my case now. I have not only had the misfortune in the beginning, that Plangon, the mother of these men, deceived my father, and by manifest perjury forced him against his will to acknowledge them, and consequently I was deprived of two thirds of my patrimony: but, in addition to this, I have been driven by my opponents out of my paternal house, in which I was born and bred, and in which I received them after my father's death, though he in his lifetime would never admit them to it; and I am deprived of the marriage portion of my own mother, for which I am now suing. I have myself given them satisfaction for all the demands which they made upon me, except a few cross-demands which they have vexatiously brought against me on account of this action, as will be perfectly clear to you; yet from them in a period of eleven years I have not been able to obtain anything that is reasonable, and at length I have recourse to you for protection. I beseech you then, men of the jury, to give me a favourable hearing while I address you to the best of my ability, and, if it shall appear to you that I have been shamefully treated, to forgive my coming here to recover what is my own, the more especially as it is for a portion to give with my daughter; for I married when only eighteen at my father's request, and so it happens that I have a daughter already marriageable. It is just therefore on many accounts that you should redress the wrongs which have been done to me; and it is meet that you show resentment against these men ; who (0 earth and heaven!) when they might by doing justice have avoided coming into court, are not ashamed to remind you thing which our father may have done amiss or any offence which they committed against him, and actually force me into litigation with them. To make you clearly understand, that it is not I, but my opponents, who are the cause of this proceeding, I will relate the facts of the case to you from the beginning in as short a compass as possible. of any My mother, men of the jury, was the daughter of Polyaratus of Cholargus, and sister of Menexenus and Bathyllus and Periander. Her father having given her in marriage to Cleomedon, the son of Cleon, with a portion of a talent, she lived with him as his wife, and bore him three daughters and one son, named Cleon; her husband then died, and she left his family and received back the portion. Her brothers Menexenus and Bathyllus (Periander being yet a minor) gave her in marriage again with the talent for her portion, and she lived in wedlock with my father. They had issue myself and a younger brother, who died in infancy. I will first call witnesses, to prove to you that I am stating these facts correctly. [Witnesses.] My father, having thus espoused my mother, lived with her in his own house and treated her as his wife; me he brought up, and showed a fatherly affection to me, such as you all show to your children. With Plangon, the mother of these men, he had intercourse of some kind or other; (it is not for me to say what :) his passion however was so far under restraint, that even after my mother's death he did not choose to receive her into his house as an inmate, nor could he be persuaded that these men were his children; and they lived all the rest of the time without being regarded as my father's sons, as most of you are aware; but after Bootus had grown up and had leagued himself with a gang of pettifoggers, at the head of whom were Mnesicles and Menecles, the person who convicted Ninus, with whose assistance he went to law with my father, pretending that he was his son -many meetings took place about these affairs, and my father said, nothing could convince him that these men were his children; at length Plangon, men of the jury, (for the whole truth shall be told you,) conspiring with Menecles against my father, and deceiving him by an oath which among all mankind is held to be the most solemn and awful, agreed that upon receipt of thirty minas she would get her brothers to adopt these men, and that, if my father would challenge her before the arbitrator to swear that the children were his, she would decline the challenge; so, she said, while her children would not be deprived of their civic rights, they would no longer have it in their power to annoy my father, their mother having refused the oath. These terms being assented to-I needn't make a long story of it-he attended before the arbitrator, and Plangon, in violation of all her engagements, accepts the challenge, and swears in the Delphinium an oath directly contrary to her former oath, as most of you are aware; for the transaction was much talked about. My father was thus by reason of his own challenge under the necessity of submitting to the award; at the same time he was indignant at what had occurred, and took it much to heart, and would not even then receive these persons into his house, although he was compelled to introduce them to his clarsmen. And he entered this one in the register under the name of Bootus, his brother under the name of Pamphilus. As I was about eighteen years of age, he persuaded me at once to marry the daughter of Euphemus, wishing to |