On The Estate of Apollodorus

All men, when they are near their end, take measures of precaution on their own behalf to prevent their families from becoming extinct and to secure that there shall be someone to perform sacrifices and carry out the customary rites over them. And so, even if they die without issue, they at any rate adopt children and leave them behind. And there is not merely a personal feeling in favor of this course, but the state has taken public measures to secure that it shall be followed, since by law it entrusts the archon with the duty of preventing families from being extinguished.

Now it was quite clear to Apollodorus that, if he left his estate in the hands of my opponents, he would be securing the extinction of his house. For what did he see before his eyes? He saw that these sisters of Apollodorus (II.) inherited their brother's estate, but never gave him a son by adoption, though they had sons of their own, and that their husbands had sold the landed property which he left behind him and his possessions for five talents and divided up the proceeds, but that his house had been left shamefully and deplorably desolate. Knowing that their brother had been treated thus, could he himself have ever expected, even if there had been friendship between him and them, to receive the customary rites from them, being only their cousin and not their brother?