Against Diogeiton (11-15)

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 place[*] 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.

And she convicted him further of having recovered seven talents and four thousand drachmae of bottomry loans, and she produced the record of these; for she showed that in the course of his removal from Collytus[*] to the house of Phaedrus the children had happened upon the register, which had been mislaid, and had brought it to her.

She also proved that he had recovered a hundred minae which had been lent at interest on land mortgages, besides two thousand drachmae and some furniture of great value; and that corn came in to them every year from the Chersonese.[*] After that, she said, you had the audacity to state, when you had so much money in your possession, that their father bequeathed them two thousand drachmae and thirty staters,—just the amount that was bequeathed to me, and that I gave you after his decease!