Note 123 — Chapter III

The speeches of the Greek orators are full of proofs that these beliefs had a great hold upon the popular mind, even as late as the time of Demosthenes. In contested cases of adoption they always laid great stress upon the dangers which would menace the city if a family was allowed to become extinct for want of precautions against the failure of the hereditary line; there would then be some neglected tomb where the dead never received the visits of gift-bringing friends, a neglect which would be visited upon the city as a whole as the accomplice in such abandonment. Such an argument and others like it may not seem to us to be of great judicial value, but the talent of an Isæus understood how to make it tell with an audience, or we should not find it so often repeated in his pleadings (see G. Perrot, L'Éloquence politique et judiciare à Athènes. Les Précurseurs de Demosthène, pp. 359-364).