Against Aphobus I

The rest of the estate—an amount twice as large—they might have invested profitably, and, if greedy for money, have taken a reasonable amount for themselves, and have increased my estate from the income, besides keeping the principal intact. Yet they did nothing of the sort. Instead, by selling to one another the most valuable of the slaves and by absolutely doing away with the rest, they destroyed the existing source of my income and secured a considerable one for themselves at my cost.

Having taken all the rest thus shamefully, they unite in maintaining that more than half of my property was never left to me at all. They have rendered an account as though the estate were one of five talents only; they do not produce the principal, though reporting no income from it, but have the impudence to tell me that the capital itself has been expended. And for this audacity they feel no shame.

What, pray, would have been my plight, if I had continued longer as their ward? They would have hard work to tell. For when, after the lapse of ten years, I have recovered so little from two of these men, and by the third am even set down as a debtor, have I not good ground for indignation? Nay, it is wholly clear. If I had been left an orphan of a year old, and had been six years longer under their guardianship, I should never have recovered even the pitiful amounts I now have. For, if the expenditures they have made were justifiable, the sums they have handed over to me would not have lasted six years, but they would either have had to support me themselves or to have let me perish from hunger.