Book 2
1262a
Again, each speaks of one of his fellow-citizens who is prospering or getting on badly as my son only in the sense of the fractional part which he forms of the whole number—that is, he says my son or so-and-so’s son, specifying as the father any individual of the thousand citizens or whatever the number be of which the state consists, and even this dubiously, for it is uncertain who has chanced to have had a son born to him and when born safely reared. Yet which is the better way to use the word mine—this way, each of two thousand or ten thousand people applying it to the same thing, or rather the way in which they say mine in the actual states now? for the same person is called my son by one man and my brother by another, and another calls him nephew, or by some other relationship, whether of blood or by affinity and marriage, the speaker’s own in the first place, or that of his relations; and in addition someone else calls him fellow-clansman or fellow-tribesman. For it is better for a boy to be one’s own private nephew than one’s son in the way described. Moreover it would also be impossible to avoid men’s supposing certain persons to be their real brothers and sons and fathers and mothers; for they would be bound to form their belief about each other by the resemblances which occur between children and parents. This indeed is said by some of those who write of travels round the worldBooks of geography, founded on travellers’ reports—a famous one by Hecataeus, scoffed at by Hdt. 4.36. actually to occur;they say that some of the people of Upper Libya have their wives in common, yet the children born are divided among them according to their personal resemblances. And there are some females both of the human race and of the other animals, for instance horses and cattle, who have a strong natural tendency to produce off-spring resembling the male parents, as was the case with the mare at Pharsalus named Honest Lady.Or possibly Docile ( Jackson), cf. Xen. Hunt. 7.4.
