Apollodorus Against Callippus

then, when he learned that my father was in poor health, and had difficulty in coming up to the city, and that his sight was failing, he brought an action against him, not indeed an action for money, like the present one, but an action for damages, declaring that my father had wrought him injury by paying to Cephisiades the money which Lycon, the Heracleote, had left in his keeping after having promised not to pay it without the plaintiff’s consent. After he had brought suit, he took back the papers from the public arbitrator, and challenged my father to refer the case to Lysitheides, a friend of Callippus himself and of Isocrates and Aphareus,[*](These were doubtless the famous orator and the tragic poet.) and an acquaintance of my father.

My father gave his consent, and during his lifetime Lysitheides despite his intimacy with these men did not venture to commit any wrong against us. And yet some of the plaintiff’s friends are so lacking in shame, that they had the audacity to depose that Callippus challenged my father to take an oath, and that my father refused to swear before Lysitheides; and they imagine that they can convince you that in that case Lysitheides, a friend of Callippus and the one acting as arbitrator in the case, would have refrained from making an immediate award against my father, especially since my father thus refused to make himself the judge of his own case.[*](By refusing, that is, to take the oath on the basis of which the award would have been made.)

That I am telling the truth and that these men are lying, is proved, I claim, by the very fact that Lysitheides would have made the award against my father, and that I should now be defendant in an ejectment suit, and not in an action for money; and, besides this, I shall bring before you as witnesses the persons who were present on the various occasions when I met the plaintiff before Lysitheides.

The Witnesses

That he did not challenge my father to an oath at that time, but now maligns him after his death, and brings forward his own intimates who recklessly bear false witness against me, you can easily see from the circumstantial evidence and from the deposition. And that I was ready on my father’s behalf to take the oath which the law prescribes when an heir is sued in court on a charge brought against one who is dead,—

that, namely, I believed that my father never agreed to pay the plaintiff the money which Lycon left, and that the plaintiff was not introduced to my father by Lycon; and Phormion was ready to swear that in very truth he had himself reckoned up the amount with Lycon in the presence of Archebiades, and that instructions were given him to pay the money to Cephisiades, and that Archebiades had identified Cephisiades for him;