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 !