[40]
Now take,
please, the depositions of the members of the clan belonging to the same gens as
my mother, and of the members of the deme, and of those who have the right of
burial in the same tombs.“
Depositions
”As to my mother's lineage, then, I prove
to you in this way that she was an Athenian on both the male and the female
side. My mother, men of the jury, first married Protomachus, to whom she was
given by Timocrates, her brother born of the same father and the same
mother1; and she had by
him a daughter. Then she married my father and gave birth to me. But how it was
that she came to marry my father you must hear; for the charges which my
opponent makes regarding Cleinias and my mother's having served as
nurse—all this too I will set forth to you clearly.
1 In order that a marriage should be legitimate it was necessary that the woman should be given in marriage by a near male relative—generally her father or her brother, or in default of these by someone acting in their stead.
Demosthenes. Demosthenes with an English translation by Norman W. DeWitt, Ph.D., and Norman J. DeWitt, Ph.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1949.
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