Impotent old men and designing young women are the chief figures in most of Isæus’ speeches; and, as his editor says, to have any confidence in the veracity or virtue of his clients argues a truly Arcadian simplicity. There is the case of Euctemon, for example—the old man who divorces his wife and leaves his children, to live with his slave-woman, Alce. This unfortunate, whose youth has been degraded for her master’s profit, has her revenge when the old man grows senile. She induces him to remove her from the den of infamy which has been one of the sources of his wealth, to live with her in the drinking-shop over which she is put in charge, and finally to recognise one of her bastards as his own son. The family, threatened by a second marriage, reluctantly consent to help in an adoption which ran counter to the first principles of Attic law; and it is not until the old man’s death, when his property falls into dispute, that his ‘misfortunes’ with the woman (so the advocate euphemistically describes them) come to light. The facts of the case are utterly sordid; but every detail is enveloped by Isæus in a cloud of sophistical arguments which show both a complete absence of moral sense in the advocate and so great a faculty of deception that modern writers have inferred—it need not be said with how little reason—that polygamy was not illegal at Athens, that concubinage was recognised by law, and that bastards had the rights of legitimate children. All three statements are untrue; but they may fairly be deduced from the ever-shifting arguments that the lawyer uses. In another of his cases it is an old man at death’s door who marries a young girl, and the usual imputations upon the bride’s motives form one of his strongest arguments. In a third, the estate of Pyrrhus, a woman of notoriously bad life is foisted by her brother upon one of her old lovers, and the claim is then made that she is his legal wife.