On The Estate Of Pyrrhus (20-24)

When direct evidence has to be given in court, we are obliged to employ those who were actually present, whosoever they are, as witnesses; but when it is a question of obtaining a written deposition from a witness who is ill or about to go abroad, each of us summons by preference the most reputable among his fellow-citizens and those best known to us,

and we always have written depositions made in the presence not of one or two only but of as many witnesses as possible, in order to preclude the deponent from denying his deposition at some future date, and to give his evidence more weight in your eyes by the unanimous testimony of many honest men.

Thus, when Xenocles went to our factory at the mines at Besa,[*] he did not think it sufficient to rely on any chance person who happened to be there as witness regarding the eviction, but took with him from Athens Diophantus of Sphettus, who defended him in the former case, and Dorotheus of Eleusis,[*] and his brother Philochares, and many other witnesses, having invited them to make a journey of nearly three hundred stades from here to there;

yet when, on the question of the marriage of the grandmother of his own children, he was obtaining, as he declares, a written deposition in Athens itself, he is shown to have summoned none of his own friends but Dionysius of Erchia and Aristolochus of Aethalidae. In the presence of these two men my opponents declare that they obtained the written deposition—a document of this nature in the presence of men whom no one else would trust in any matter whatsoever!

Perhaps it will be urged that it was a trifling matter of secondary importance about which they say that they obtained the deposition from Pyretides, so that negligence in the affair was not surprising. How so, when the trial for perjury, in which Xenocles was defendant, turned upon this very point, as to whether his own wife was the child of a concubine or of a legitimate wife? To attest a deposition like this, if it were really true, would he not have thought fit to summon all his own friends?