[6]
You have heard
from the witnesses the manner in which our father enrolled us; I shall now show
to you that, as the defendant did not choose to abide by this enrollment, it was
both just and necessary for me to bring suit. For I am surely not so stupid nor
unreasonable a person as to have agreed to take only a third of my father's
estate (though the whole of it was coming to me), seeing that
my father had adopted these men, and to be content with that, and then to engage
in a quarrel with my kin1 about a name, were it not that for me to change
mine would bring great dishonor and a reputation for cowardice, while for my
opponent to have the same name as myself was on many accounts impossible.
1 Literally, “to strive with one under the same yoke.” Such metaphors were very common in Greek antiquity, when horses as well as oxen were driven under the same yoke.
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