Book XI, 376

An unhappy man, going to the rhetor Diodorus, consulted him about the following case. ‘My slave-girl ran away once and a certain man found her, and knowing her to be another man’s servant married her to his own slave. She bore him children, and I wish to know whose slaves they legally are.” When he had considered and looked up every book, he said, twisting his eyebrows into a semi-circle: “Those about whom you enquire must either be your slaves or those of the man who took your slave-girl. Seek a well-disposed judge and you will at once get a more favourable decision, at least if what you say is just.