15
After this there is a second law, covering agreements between individuals, which states that whenever anyone sells a slave, he must declare in advance any physical disability from which the man suffers. Otherwise the slave in question can be returned to the vendor. And yet if a slave can be returned simply because of some weakness due to mischance which the master keeps secret at the time of the sale, how can you fail to take the responsibility for the crimes which you deliberately planned? But the epileptic slave does not involve the buyer in fresh expense, whereas Midas, whom you sold to me, has even lost my friends’ money.
16
Consider the legal position, Athenogenes, as regards free persons as well as slaves. No doubt you know as everyone does that the children of married women are legitimate. Yet the mere act of betrothing a woman on the part of a father or brother was not enough for the lawmaker. On the contrary, he wrote expressly in the lawThis law is mentioned by Demosthenes (Dem. 44.49) and quoted in Dem. 46.18, from which the text is here reconstructed. : whomsoever any man has lawfully betrothed as wife, her children shall be legitimate; not: if any man has betrothed some other woman on the pretence that she is his daughter. He lays it down that just betrothals shall be valid and unjust ones invalid.
