39
Thus I acted in this manner under compulsion; but in order that they might gain no advantage over me by alleging to you that I bore no part of the funeral expenses, I consulted the interpreter of the sacred law and by his advice I paid for at my own expense and offered the ninth-day offerings in the most sumptuous manner possible, in order that I might confound their sacrilegious tricks, and that it might not seem that they had paid for everything and I for nothing, but that I might be thought to have done my share.
40
Such in substance, gentlemen, are the events which have occurred and the causes of all this trouble. If you understood the impudence of Diocles and his behavior on all other occasions, you would have no difficulty in believing anything in my story. For the fortune which he now possesses, and with which he makes such a brave show, is not really his; for when his three half-sisters, the children of his mother, were left heiresses, he represented himself as the adopted son of their father, though the latter left no will to this effect.
41
When the husbands of two of the sisters tried to obtain possession of their fortune, he imprisoned the husband of the eldest of them by walling him upThe reading οἰκοδομήσας is supported by Hippocration, s.v. (i.q.κατακλεῖν εἰς οἴκημα), but the meaning is uncertain. Possibly Diocles forcibly detained his brother-in-law from performing some duty to the state and thus caused his disenfranchisement. and by a plot deprived him of his civic rights, and though he was indicted for outrage he has not yet been punished. As for the husband of the next sister, he ordered a slave to kill him and smuggled away the murderer, and then threw the guilt upon his sister,
