Against Eubulides

Protomachus was a poor man, but becoming entitled to inherit a large estate by marrying an heiress,[*](A woman could not inherit property but herself passed with the estate to the nearest male heir. He was then entitled, and obliged, to marry her or to give her in marriage. If he chose the former alternative and was alread married, he necessarily divorced his wife or gave her in marriage to another.) and wishing to give my mother in marriage, he persuaded my father Thucritus, an acquaintance of his, to take her, and my father received my mother in marriage at the hands of her brother Timocrates of Melitê, in the presence of both his own uncles and other witnesses; and of these as many as are still living shall give testimony before you.

Some time after this, when by now two children had been born to her, she was compelled at a time when my father was absent on military service with Thrasybulus and she herself was in hard straits, to take Cleinias, the son of Cleidicus, to nurse. This act of hers was, Heaven knows, none too fortunate with reference to the danger which has now come upon me (for it was from this nursing that all the slander about us has arisen); but in view of the poverty with which she had to cope she did what was perhaps both necessary and fitting.

Now it is plain, men of Athens, that it was not my father who first received my mother in marriage. No; it was Protomachus,and he had by her a son, and a daughter whom he gave in marriage. And he, even though dead, bears testimony by what he did that my mother was an Athenian and of civic birth.

To prove that these statements of mine are true, (to the clerk) call first, please, the sons of Protomachus, and next the witnesses who were present when my mother was betrothed to my father, and from the members of the clan the kinsfolk to whom my father gave the marriage-feast in honor of my mother. After them call Eunicus of Cholargus,[*](Cholargus, a deme of the tribe Acamantis.) who received my sister in marriage from Protomachus, and then my sister’s son. Call them.

The Witnesses

Would not my lot, men of Athens, be more piteous than that of any other, if, when all this host of witnesses deposes and swears that they are of my kin, and when no one disputes the citizenship of any one of these, you should vote that I am an alien?

(To the clerk.) Take, please, also the deposition of Cleinias and that of his relatives; for they, I presume, know who my mother was who once served as his nurse. Their oath requires them to bear witness, not to what I say today, but to what they have always known regarding her who was reputed to be my mother and the nurse of Cleinias.

For even if a nurse is a lowly thing, I do not shun the truth. For it is not our being poor that would mark us as wrong-doers, but our not being citizens; and the present trial has to do, not with our fortune or our money, but with our descent. Many are the servile acts which free men are compelled by poverty to perform, and for these they should be pitied, men of Athens, rather than be brought also to utter ruin. For, as I am informed, many women have become nurses and laborers at the loom or in the vineyards owing to the misfortunes of the city in those days, women of civic birth, too; and many who were poor then are now rich. However, I shall speak of these matters by and by.

(To the clerk.) For the moment, please call the witnesses.

The Witnesses

Well then, that I am a citizen on both my mother’s and my father’s side you have all learned, partly from the testimony which has just been given and partly from that previously given regarding my father. It remains for me to speak to you about myself—and my statement is, I think, the simplest and the most reasonable—, that, since I am of civic birth on the side of both parents and have shared by inheritance both the property and the family, I am a citizen. Nevertheless I will produce witnesses to establish also all the circumstances which befit a citizen—that I was inducted into the clan, that I was enrolled on the register of the demesmen, that by these men themselves I was nominated among the noblest-born to draw lots for the priesthood of Heracles, and that I passed the scrutiny and held offices.

(To the clerk.) Call them, please.

The Witnesses

Is it not an outrage, men of the jury, that, whereas, if I had been chosen by lot as priest, even as I had been nominated, it would have been my duty to offer sacrifice on behalf of these people, and Eubulides would have had to join in the sacrifice with me,—is it not an outrage, I ask, that these same people should not allow me even to share in the sacrifices with them? It is plain, then, men of Athens, that in all previous time I have been acknowledged as a citizen by all those who now accuse me;

for surely Eubulides would never have suffered the foreigner or resident alien, as he now calls me, either to hold offices or to draw lots with himself as a nominee for the priesthood; for he too was one of the nominees who drew lots. Nor, men of Athens, seeing that he is an old enemy of mine, would he have waited for the present opportunity, which no one could foresee, if he had known any such facts regarding me. But he did not know them.

So, then, although he continued throughout all the past to act as a member of the deme and to draw lots for offices together with me without seeing any of these objections, yet, when the whole city was roused to sharp indignation against those who had recklessly forced their way into the demes, then, and not till then, he laid his plots. The earlier time would have suited one who was convinced of the truth of his charges; but the present suits an enemy and one who will stoop to malicious pettifoggery.

For my own part, men of the jury (and I beg you by Zeus and the gods, let no one make an outcry or be vexed at what I am going to say), I hold myself to be an Athenian on the same grounds on which each one of you holds himself to be one, having from the first regarded as my mother her whom I represent as such to you, and not pretending to be hers while really belonging to another; and in regard to my father the case is the same.