1
There is nothing novel or surprising, gentlemen of the jury, in my father’s present course, and this is not the first time that he has displayed such anger; on the contrary, he keeps this law always in readiness and resorts to this court by habit.The law permitting a father to disown his son, and the court before which his complaint had to be presented. No certain case of disownment at Athens is known; but Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Arch., II, 26) says that provisions for it were included in the codes of Solon, Pittacus, and Charondas, there is one in Plato’s Laws (XI, 928D; it involves a family council), and Egyptian documents attest it. P. M. Meyer, in publishing one of them (Juristische Papyri, No. XI) cites Cod. Just., VIII, 46, 6: abdicatio, quae Graeco more ad alienandos liberos usurpatur et apoceryxis dicebatur, Romanis legibus non comprobatur. , There is, however, something of novelty in my present plight, in that I am under no personal charge, but am in jeopardy of punishment on behalf of my profession because it cannot in every particular obey his behests. But what could be more absurd than to give treatment under orders, in accordance, not with the powers of the profession, but with the desires of my father? I could wish, to be sure, that medical science had a remedy of such sort that it could check not only insanity but unjust anger, in order that I might cure my father of this disorder also. As things are, his madness has been completely assuaged, but his anger is growing worse, and (what is hardest of all) he is sane to everyone else and insane towards me alone, his physician. You see, therefore, what fee I receive for my attendance—I am disowned by him once more and put away from my family a second time, as if I had been taken back for a brief space merely that I might be more disgraced by being turned out of the household repeatedly.
