On hearing these words they went away, aghast and weeping, to their mother, and brought her along with them to me. It was pitiful to see how they suffered from the blow: the poor wretches, turned out of doors, wept aloud and besought me not to allow them to be deprived of their patrimony and reduced to beggary by the last persons who ought to have committed this outrage upon them, but to give my best aid, for their sister’s sake as well as their own.

Of the mourning that filled my house at that time it would take long to tell. In the end, their mother implored and entreated me to assemble her father and friends together, saying that even though she had not before been accustomed to speak in the presence of men, the severity of their misfortunes would compel her to give us a full account of their hardships.

I went first and expressed my indignation to Hegemon, the husband of this man’s daughter; I then discussed the matter with the other relations; and I called upon this man to allow his handling of the money to be investigated. Diogeiton at first refused, but finally he was compelled by his friends. When we held our meeting, the mother asked him what heart he could have, that he thought fit to take such measures with the children, when you are their father’s brother, she said, and my father, and their uncle and grandfather.

Even if you felt no shame before any man, you ought to have feared the gods. For you received from him, when he went on the expedition, five talents in deposit. I offer to swear to the truth of this on the lives of my children, both these and those since born to me, in any placei.e., in some temple. that you yourself may name. Yet I am not so abject, or so fond of money, as to take leave of life after perjuring myself on the lives of my own children, and to appropriate unjustly my father’s estate.