[20]
You see, men of
Athens, what keeps happening and the annoyance resulting from the matter. But
even if there were no annoying results, and if it were not absolutely impossible
for us both to have the same name, it surely is not fair for him to have his
share of my property by virtue of the adoption which my father made under
compulsion, and for me to be robbed of the name which that father gave me of his
own free will and under constraint from no one. I, certainly, think it is not.
Now, to show you that my father not only made the entry in the list of the
clansmen in the manner which has been testified to you, but that he gave me this
name when he kept the tenth day after my birth,1
please take this deposition.“
Deposition
”
1 The child was formally named at a ceremony held on the tenth day after birth, and attended by members of the family and close friends.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by A. T. Murray, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1939.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.