20
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,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. please take this deposition.
20
The Deposition
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.
22
He had the effrontery, moreover, to make before the arbitrator the most audacious assertions, that my father kept the tenth day after birth for him, just as for me, and gave him the name Mantitheus; and he brought forward as witnesses persons with whom my father was never known to be intimate. But I think that not one of you is unaware that no man would have kept the tenth day for a child which he did not believe was rightly his own; nor, if he had kept the day and shown the affection one would feel for a son, would afterward have dared to deny him.
