33
Is it not obvious, gentlemen, that the events which they deposed to have happened long ago were invented by them much later for the purpose of claiming the estate?The restoration of the text here is uncertain but the meaning clear. For otherwise it would have been impossible that the uncles, who were summoned, according to their own account, to the tenth-day ceremony in honor of Pyrrhus's daughter, the defendant's niece, could ever have come into court with so accurate a recollection from that distant date, whenever it was, that her father at that ceremony named her Cleitarete,
34
but that the nearer relatives, the father and the uncle and the mother should not know the name of the child whom they declare to be Pyrrhus's daughter. They would most certainly have known it, if the fact had been true. But I shall have occasion to return to these uncles later.Isaeus 3.63-71
35
As for Nicodemus's evidence it is not difficult to decide from the actual text of the laws that he has obviously committed perjury. For seeing that, if a man gives with a woman a sum not duly assessed in a contract, and if the wife leaves her husband or the hushand puts away his wife, the man who gave the money cannot, as far as the law is concerned, demand back what he gave but did not assess in a contract—the defendant when he states that he gave his sister in marriage without any contract regarding a dowry, is obviously proved to be making an impudent assertion.
36
For what was likely to be the good to him of the marriage, if the husband could dismiss the wife whenever he wished? And this he certainly could do, if he had made no stipulation that he should receive a dowry with her. Would Nicodemus have married his sister to our uncle on these terms, and this, though he knew all the time that in the past she had produced no offspring, and though the dowry, if it had been assessed in a contract, was coming to him, if anything happened to her before she bore any children?
