A son who had been disowned studied medicine. When his
father became insane and had been given up by the other
doctors, he cured him by administering a remedy, and was again
received into the family. After that, he was ordered to
cure his stepmother, who was insane, and as he refused to do so,
he is now being disowned again. The words in italics are supplied to give the approximate sense of those lost in the Greek text. 
 There is nothing novel or surprising, gentlemen of
the jury, in my father’s present course, and this is
not the first time that he has displayed such anger ;
on the contrary, he keeps this law always in readiness
and resorts to this court by habit. The law permitting a father to disown his son, and the court before which his complaint had to be presented. No certain case of disownment at Athens is known; but Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Arch., II, 26) says that provisions for it were included in the codes of Solon, Pittacus, and Charondas, there is one in Plato’s Laws (XI, 928D; it involves a family council), and Egyptian documents attest it. P. M. Meyer, in publishing one of them (Juristische Papyri, No. XI) cites Cod. Just., VIII, 46, 6: abdicatio, quae Graeco more ad alienandos liberos usurpatur et apoceryxis dicebatur, Romanis legibus non comprobatur. , There is, however,
something of novelty in my present plight, in that I
am under no personal charge, but am in jeopardy of
punishment on behalf of my profession because it
cannot in every particular obey his behests. But what
could be more absurd than to give treatment under
orders, in accordance, not with the powers of the profession, but with the desires of my father? I could
wish, to be sure, that medical science had a remedy




 

of such sort that it could check not only insanity
but unjust anger, in order that I might cure my
father of this disorder also. As things are, his
madness has been completely assuaged, but his
anger is growing worse, and (what is hardest of all)
he is sane to everyone else and insane towards me
alone, his physician. You see, therefore, what fee
I receive for my attendance—I am disowned by him
once more and put away from my family a second
time, as if I had been taken back for a brief space
merely that I might be more disgraced by being
turned out of the household repeatedly.
 
For my part, in cases which can be cured I do not
wait to be summoned; on the previous occasion, for
instance, I came to his relief uncalled. But when a
case is perfectly desperate, I am unwilling even to
essay it. And in respect to this woman I am with
good reason even less venturesome, since I take into
consideration how I should be treated by my father
if I were to fail, when without having so much as begun treating her I am disowned. I am indeed
pained, gentlemen of the jury, at my stepmother’s
serious condition (for she was a good woman), at
my father’s distress on her account, and most of all
at my own apparent disobedience and real inabilit
to do the'service which is enjoined upon me, bot
because of the extraordinary violence of the illness
and the ineffectiveness of the art of healing. I do
not think, however, that it is just to disown a man
who declines at the outset to promise what he
cannot perform.
 
The charges on which he disowned me before
can be readily understood from the present situation.
To those charges I have made a sufficient answer, I

 

think, by my subsequent life, and these accusations
which he now brings I shall dispose of to the best of
my ability; but first I shall tell you a little about my
position. 
I who am so difficult and disobedient, who so disgrace my father and act so unworthily of my family,
on the former occasion thought it behoved me to
make little opposition to him when he was making
all that clamour and straining his lungs. On leaving
the house, I expected to have a grand jury and a
true verdict in my subsequent life, with its disclosure
that I was at a very great remove from those offences
with which I had been charged by my father, that I
had devoted myself to the noblest of pursuits, and
that I was frequenting the best company. I foresaw,
too, something like this, suspecting even then that it
indicated no great sanity in a father to be angry
unjustly and to concoct false accusations against a
son. And there were those who held all that to be
the beginning of madness, the hostile demonstration
and skirmish-fire of the disease that was soon to
fall upon him—the insensate hatred, the cruel law,
the ready abusiveness, the grim tribunal, the clamour,
the anger, and in general the atrabiliousness which
impregnated the whole proceedings. Therefore I
expected that perhaps I should some day need a
knowledge of medicine.
 
I went abroad, then, studied with the most famous
physicians in foreign parts, and by dint of great
labour and insistent zeal thoroughly mastered the
art. On my return I found my father by then defin-


 

itively insane and given up by the local physicians, who
had not profound insight and could not accurately distinguish different forms of disease. Yet I did as was
natural for an uprigne son to do, neither cherishing
a grudge because of my being disowned, nor waiting
to be sent after; for I had no fault to find with him
personally, but all those offences were of extraneous
origin and, as I have said already, peculiar to the
disease. So I came without being called, but did
not begin the treatment at once. It is not our
custom to do so, and the art of medicine does not recommend that course; we are taught first of all to
observe whether the disease is curable or irremediable
and beyond the limits of medical skill. Then, if it
is manageable, we put our hands to it and make
every effort to save the patient; but if we see that
the ailment already has the upper hand and is victorious, we do not touch it at all, observing an ancient
law of the progenitors of the art of medicine, who
say that one must not lay hand to those who are
overmastered. Hippocrates, de Arte, 3. 
Since I saw that my father was still within hope
and his ailment not beyond professional skill, after
long observation and accurate investigation of all
details I set my hand to it at last and compounded
my remedy confidently, although many of those
present were suspicious of my prescription, critical of
my treatment of the case, and ready to bring charges
against me.