Mantitheus Against Boeotus I (1-5)

It was not from any love of litigation I protest by the gods, men of the jury, that I brought this suit against Boeotus, nor was I unaware that it will seem strange to many people that I should bring suit because somebody thought right to have the same name as myself; but it was necessary to have the matter decided in your court, in view of the consequences that must result if I do not get this matter righted.

If the defendant declared himself the son of another father and not of my own, I should naturally have seemed meddlesome in caring by what name he chose to call himself; but, as it is, he brought suit against my father, and having got up a gang of blackmailers[*] to support him—Mnesicles, whom you all probably know, and that Menecles who secured the conviction of Ninus,[*] and others of the same sort—he went into court, alleging that he was my father’s son by the daughter of Pamphilus, and that he was being outrageously treated, and robbed of his civic rights.

My father (for the whole truth shall be told you, men of the jury) feared to come into court lest someone, on the ground of having elsewhere received some injury from him in his public life, should confront him here; and at the same time he was deceived by this man’s mother. For she had sworn that if he should tender her an oath in this matter, she would refuse it, and that, when this had been done, all relations between them would be at an end; and she had also had money deposited in the hands of a third party on her behalf[*];—on these conditions, then, my father tendered her the oath.

But she accepted it, and swore that not only the defendant, but his brother too, her other son, was my father’s child. When she had done this it was necessary to enter them among the clansmen,[*] and there was no excuse left. My father did enter them; he adopted them as his children and (to cut short the intervening matters) he enrolled the defendant at the Apaturia[*] as Boeotus on the list of the clansmen, and the other as Pamphilus. But I had already been enrolled as Mantitheus.

My father’s death happened before the entries were made on the register of the demesmen,[*] but the defendant went and enrolled himself on the register as Mantitheus, instead of Boeotus. How great a wrong he did in this—to me, in the first place, but also to you—I shall show, as soon as I have brought forward witnesses to prove my assertions.

The Witnesses