2
For my part, in cases which can be cured I do not wait to be summoned; on the previous occasion, for instance, I came to his relief uncalled. But when a case is perfectly desperate, I am unwilling even to essay it. And in respect to this woman I am with good reason even less venturesome, since I take into consideration how I should be treated by my father if I were to fail, when without having so much as begun treating her I am disowned. I am indeed pained, gentlemen of the jury, at my stepmother’s serious condition (for she was a good woman), at my father’s distress on her account, and most of all at my own apparent disobedience and real inabilit to do the'service which is enjoined upon me, bot because of the extraordinary violence of the illness and the ineffectiveness of the art of healing. I do not think, however, that it is just to disown a man who declines at the outset to promise what he cannot perform.
3
The charges on which he disowned me before can be readily understood from the present situation. To those charges I have made a sufficient answer, I think, by my subsequent life, and these accusations which he now brings I shall dispose of to the best of my ability; but first I shall tell you a little about my position.
