Against Phormio

The request that I shall make of you, men of the jury, is a fair one, that you should hear us with goodwill as we speak in our turn,[*](Others, less probably, render, as we take our turns in addressing you.) knowing well that we are wholly without experience in the art of speaking; and long as we have been frequenting your mart, and many as are the merchants to whom we have made loans, we have never until now appeared in any suit before you either as plaintiffs or as defendants.

And you may be sure, men of Athens, that we should not even now have brought this action against Phormio, if we believed that the money which we lent him had been lost on the ship that was wrecked; we are not so shameless nor so unaccustomed to losses. But as many have kept taunting us, and especially those who were in Bosporus with Phormio, who knew that he had not lost the money together with the ship, we thought it a dreadful thing not to seek redress after being wronged as we had been by this man.

With reference to the special plea my argument is a brief one. For even the defendants do not absolutely deny that a contract was made on your exchange[*](The word rendered exchange or market, may well designate merely the Peiraeus, which was in a very real sense the ἐμπόριον of Athens.); but they claim that there exists no longer any obligation on their part due to the contract, for they have done nothing that contravenes the terms of the agreement.

The laws, however, in accordance with which you sit as jurors, do not use this language. They do indeed allow the production of a special plea when there has been no contract at all at Athens or for the Athenian market; but if a man admits that a contract was made, yet contends that he has done everything that the contract requires, they bid him to make a defence on the merits of the case, and not to make the plaintiff a defendant.[*](As happened, of course, when a plea in bar of action was introduced.) Not but that I hope to prove from the facts of the case itself that this suit of mine is admissible.