On The Estate Of Pyrrhus (30-34)

These same uncles have deposed that they were present by invitation of their nephew at the tenth-day ceremony[*] in honor of the child who was declared to be his daughter. Here I note with the utmost indignation that the husband, in claiming her paternal inheritance on behalf of his wife, has put down her name as Phile, while Pyrrhus's uncles, alleging that they were present, deposed that her father called her Cleitarete, after her grandmother.

I am amazed that the man who had lived with her for more than eight years did not know the name of his own wife. Could he not have found it out before from his own witnesses? Did his wife's mother never in all that long period tell him her daughter's name? Did his uncle, Nicodemus himself, never do so?

No, her husband, instead of giving her her grandmother's name—if it was really known that this name was given her by her father—inscribed her name as Phile, and this when he was claiming the paternal inheritance for her! What was his object? Did the husband wish to deprive his wife of any title to the name of her grandmother bestowed upon her by her father?

Is it not obvious, gentlemen, that the events which they deposed to have happened long ago were invented by them much later for the purpose of claiming the estate?[*] For otherwise it would have been impossible that the uncles, who were summoned, according to their own account, to the tenth-day ceremony in honor of Pyrrhus's daughter, the defendant's niece, could ever have come into court with so accurate a recollection from that distant date, whenever it was, that her father at that ceremony named her Cleitarete,

but that the nearer relatives, the father and the uncle and the mother should not know the name of the child whom they declare to be Pyrrhus's daughter. They would most certainly have known it, if the fact had been true. But I shall have occasion to return to these uncles later.[*]