Abdicatus

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 5. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.

A son who had been disowned studied medicine. When his father became insane and had been given up by the other doctors, he cured him by administering a remedy, and was again received into the family. After that, he was ordered to cure his stepmother, who was insane, and as he refused to do so, he is now being disowned again.[*](The words in italics are supplied to give the approximate sense of those lost in the Greek text. )

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

v.5.p.479

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.

For my part, in cases which can be cured I do not wait to be summoned; on the previous occasion, for instance, I came to his relief uncalled. But when a case is perfectly desperate, I am unwilling even to essay it. And in respect to this woman I am with good reason even less venturesome, since I take into consideration how I should be treated by my father if I were to fail, when without having so much as begun treating her I am disowned. I am indeed pained, gentlemen of the jury, at my stepmother’s serious condition (for she was a good woman), at my father’s distress on her account, and most of all at my own apparent disobedience and real inabilit to do the'service which is enjoined upon me, bot because of the extraordinary violence of the illness and the ineffectiveness of the art of healing. I do not think, however, that it is just to disown a man who declines at the outset to promise what he cannot perform.