20
Succor us, then, succor us, for the sake of justice, for your own sakes, for ours, and for my dead father’s sake. Save us; have compassion on us since these, our relatives, have felt no compassion. It is to you that we have fled for protection. I beseech you, I implore you by your children, by your wives, by all the good things you possess. So may heaven give you joy of them, do not look upon me with indifference nor cause my mother, deprived of the hopes in life that are left her, to suffer a lot unworthy of her.
21
She now thinks that she is to welcome me home after I have won a just verdict from you, and that my sister will not be portionless. But, if you decide adversely (which may heaven forfend) what, think you, will be her anguish of soul when she sees me not only robbed of my patrimony, but disenfranchised as well, and has no hope that my sister will find an establishment that befits her station because of the poverty that will be ours?
22
I have not deserved, men of the jury, to fail of justice at your hands, nor has Aphobus deserved that he should retain all the money that he has wrongfully taken. Regarding myself, even though you have as yet had no experience to prove what manner of man I am in my relations to you, yet it is fair to expect that I shall not be worse than my father; but of this man you have had experience, and you know well that, though he inherited a large estate, he has shown no generosity toward you, but has been proven to be a defrauder of others.
