1
It was not from any love of litigation I protest by the gods, men of the jury, that I brought this suit against Boeotus, nor was I unaware that it will seem strange to many people that I should bring suit because somebody thought right to have the same name as myself; but it was necessary to have the matter decided in your court, in view of the consequences that must result if I do not get this matter righted.
2
If the defendant declared himself the son of another father and not of my own, I should naturally have seemed meddlesome in caring by what name he chose to call himself; but, as it is, he brought suit against my father, and having got up a gang of blackmailersThis strong phrase occurs also in Dem. 40.9. to support him—Mnesicles, whom you all probably know, and that Menecles who secured the conviction of Ninus,Ninus was a priestess who was put to death, as the scholiast on Dem. 19.281 tells us, for supplying love-potions to young men. The case seems to have been a notorious one, and reflected little credit on Menecles. and others of the same sort—he went into court, alleging that he was my father’s son by the daughter of Pamphilus, and that he was being outrageously treated, and robbed of his civic rights.
3
My father (for the whole truth shall be told you, men of the jury) feared to come into court lest someone, on the ground of having elsewhere received some injury from him in his public life, should confront him here; and at the same time he was deceived by this man’s mother. For she had sworn that if he should tender her an oath in this matter, she would refuse it, and that, when this had been done, all relations between them would be at an end; and she had also had money deposited in the hands of a third party on her behalfThis money was evidently to be paid to her for fulfilling her promise to refuse the oath.;—on these conditions, then, my father tendered her the oath.
