[21]
You hear then,
men of Athens, that I have always been in possession of the name Mantitheus; but
that my father, when he was compelled to enter him, entered the defendant in the
list of clansmen as Boeotus. I should be glad, then, to ask him in your
presence, “If my father had not died, what would you have done in the
presence of your demesman? Would you not have allowed yourself to be registered
as Boeotus?” But it would have been absurd to bring suit to force this
and then afterwards to seek to prevent it. And yet, if you had allowed him, my
father would have enrolled you in the register of demesmen by the same name as
he did in that of the clansmen. Then, O Earth and the Gods, it is monstrous for
him to claim that Mantias is his father, and yet to have the audacity to try to
make of none effect what Mantias did in his lifetime.
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.