Against Athenogenes (11-15)

and any debt which Midas may owe to any other person. Of the contributions one was noted of which three instalments for repayment were still outstanding.[*] This was given in the name of Dicaeocrates. But the others, on the strength of which Midas had acquired everything and which were of recent date, were not entered by him in the agreement but kept secret.

On thinking it over we decided to go to Athenogenes and broach the matter. We found him near the perfume stalls and asked him whether he was not ashamed of being a liar and trapping us with the agreement by not declaring the debts beforehand. He replied that he did not know what debts we meant and that we made no impression on him; he had in safe-keeping a document relating to me which covered the transaction. A crowd gathered and overheard the incident, as our altercation took place in the market. Although they gave him a slating and told us to arrest him summarily as a kidnapper,[*] we thought it best not to do so. Instead we summoned him before you, as the law permits. First of all then, the clerk shall read you the agreement; for you shall have the actual text of the document as evidence of the plot, for which Athenogenes and no other is to blame. Read the agreement.

Well, gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the facts in detail. But Athenogenes will presently tell you that in law whatever agreements one man makes with another are binding.[*] Yes, my friend, just agreements. But if they are unjust, the opposite is true: the law forbids that they be binding. I will quote the laws themselves to make this clearer to you. For you have reduced me to such a state of fear lest I shall be ruined by you and your craftiness that I have been searching the laws night and day and studying them to the neglect of everything else.

The first law, then, stipulates that people shall not tell lies in the market, which seems to me a most admirable provision.[*] Yet you lied in the middle of the market when you made the agreement to defraud me. But if you show that you declared to me beforehand the contributions and the debts, or that you wrote in the agreement the names of those whose existence I later discovered, I have no quarrel with you; I admit that I owe the money.

After this there is a second law, covering agreements between individuals, which states that whenever anyone sells a slave, he must declare in advance any physical disability from which the man suffers. Otherwise the slave in question can be returned to the vendor. And yet if a slave can be returned simply because of some weakness due to mischance which the master keeps secret at the time of the sale, how can you fail to take the responsibility for the crimes which you deliberately planned? But the epileptic slave does not involve the buyer in fresh expense, whereas Midas, whom you sold to me, has even lost my friends’ money.