20
You have heard, then, of my father’s being taken prisoner by the enemy and of the good fortune which brought him back here. To prove now that he was your fellow-citizen, men of the jury (for this you may depend upon as being the veritable truth), I will call as witnesses those of my relatives on my father’s side who are still living.
20
(To the clerk.) Call first, please, Thucritides and Charisiades; for their father Charisius was brother to my grandfather Thucritides and my grandmother Lysaretê, and uncle to my father (for my father had married his sister born of a different mother).Such marriages were permissible under Athenian law.
21
Next, call Niciades; for his father Lysanias was brother to Thucritides and Lysaretê, and uncle to my father. After him, call Nicostratus; for his father Niciades was nephew to my grandfather and my grandmother, and cousin to my father.
21
(To the clerk.) Call all these persons, please. And do you check the water.
21
The Witnesses
22
You have heard, men of Athens, the relatives of my father on the male side both deposing and swearing that my father was an Athenian and their own kinsman. And surely not one of them would commit perjury with imprecations on his own head in the presence of those who would know that he was forswearing himself.
22
(To the clerk.) Now take also the depositions of those related to my father on the female side.
22
The Depositions
23
These persons, then, the surviving relatives of my father, on both the male and the female side, have testified that he was on both sides an Athenian and justly entitled to the rights of citizenship.
