Disowned (10-14)

When, however, under no constraint but able to do as he pleases, a man himself, of his own motion and after putting his son to the test, takes him back, what pretext for change of mind remains, or what further recourse to the law? The legislator would say to you: “If he was bad and deserved to be disowned, what made you ask him back? Why did you readmit him to your house? Why did you nullify the law? You were free and at liberty not to do this. Surely it cannot be conceded that you should make sport of the laws and that

the courts should be convened to suit your changes of mind, that the laws should be relaxed one moment and enforced the next and the jurors sit to register, or rather to execute, your decisions, inflicting a penalty at one time, bringing you together at another, as often as it shall please you. You begat him once for all, you brought him up once for all, and have once for all, in return for this, the power to disown him, and then only if you are held to be doing it justly. This persistence, this interminability, this prodigious casualness is beyond the legal right of a father.”

In Heaven’s name, gentlemen of the jury, do not permit him, once he has effected the reinstatement of his own free will, set aside the decision of the former court, and nullified his anger, to reinvoke the same penalty and to recur to the right of a father when its term by now is over and done with, inoperative in his case alone because it is already used up. You perceive, surely, that in all courts where jurors are drawn by lot, if a man thinks that the verdict is unjust, the law allows him to appeal from them to another tribunal; but if people have themselves of their own accord agreed upon jurors and willingly committed the arbitrament to them, that is not then the case. For there was no need to consult them at all; but if a man has selected them of his own choice, he ought to remain content with their decision. So it is with you: a son who seemed to you unworthy of his lineage need never have been taken back, but one whom you have pronounced good and taken

back again you will not thereafter be able to disown; for you yourself have borne witness that he does not deserve to undergo this again, and have acknowledged that he is good. It is fitting, therefore, that his reinstatement should be irrevocable and the reconciliation binding after deliberation so oft-repeated, and two sessions of court, one (the first) in which you repudiated him, the other (your own) when you changed your mind and undid it. By setting aside the earlier decision you have guaranteed your later determination. Abide, then, by your latest purpose and maintain your own verdict; you must be a father, for that is what you decided, what you approved, what you ratified.

Even if I were not your own son, but adopted, and you wished to disown me, I should not think you could; for what it was possible not to do at all, it is unjust to undo once it has taken place. But when a son has been got by birth, and then again by choice and decision, how is it reasonable to put him away again and deprive him repeatedly of that single relationship? If I happened to be a slave, and at first, thinking me vicious, you had put me in irons, but on becoming convinced that I was not a wrongdoer you had let me go and set me free, would it be in your power, if you became angry on occasion, to bring me back into the same condition of slavery? By no means, for the laws require that such pacts should be permanent and under all circumstances valid.

Upon the point that it is no longer in his power to disown one whom he has once disowned and then of his own accord taken back I still have much to say; nevertheless, I shall make an end.

But consider what manner of man he will now be disowning. I do

not mean that then I was but a layman, whereas now I am a physician, for my profession would avail me nothing in this respect. Nor that then I was young, whereas now I am well on in years and derive from my age the right to have it believed that I would do no wrong; for that too is perhaps trivial. But at that time, even if he had suffered no wrong, as I should maintain, yet he had received no benefit from me when he excluded me from the house; whereas now I have recently been his saviour and benefactor. What could be more ungrateful than that, after he had been saved through me and had escaped so great a danger, he should at once make return in this way, taking no account of that cure; nay, should so easily forget and try to drive into loneliness a man who, when he might justly have exulted over those who had unjustly cast him out, not only had borne him no grudge but actually had saved his life and made him sound of mind?

It is no trifling or commonplace benefit, gentlemen of the jury, that I have conferred upon him; and yet I am accounted worthy of treatment like this. Although he himself does not know what happened then, you all know how he acted and felt and what his condition was when, taking him in hand after the other doctors had given up, while the members of the family were avoiding him and not venturing even to approach him, I made him what you see him, so that he is able to bring charges and argue about the laws. Stay! you can see your counterpart, father; you were nearly as your wife is now, when I brought you back to your former sanity. Truly it is not just that I should receive such a recompense for it, or that

you should employ your reason only against me. That I have done you no little good is clear from the very charges which you bring; you hate me because I do not cure your wife when she is at the end of everything and in an utterly wretched plight. Since I freed you from a similar condition, why are you not far rather overjoyed and thankful to have been liberated from a state so terrible? Instead, and it is most ungrateful—you no sooner recover your sanity than you bring me to court and after your life has been saved, seek to punish me, reverting to that old-time hatred and citing the self-same law. It is a handsome fee, in truth, that you pay in this manner to the art of healing, and a fitting price for your medicines, to employ your sanity only to attack your physician!