Pliny says an 80-year-old father disinherited his daughter 11 days after remarrying, and 180 judges in four panels split two against two

Pliny the Younger, a Roman senator and advocate, wrote to his friend Romanus about an inheritance case he argued. His client was Attia Viriola, a woman of high birth married to a man of praetorian rank. Her father was over 80. He fell in love, remarried and gave her a stepmother. Within eleven days he had disinherited her. She sued for her father's estate before the centumviral court, called the Four Courts. In Latin, Pliny says she was "exheredata ab octogenario patre intra undecim dies." One hundred and eighty judges sat to hear the case in four panels. Pliny says advocates filled the benches, a dense crowd stood around the court, and people leaned over from the galleries to see and hear. He writes that fathers, daughters and stepmothers all waited on the result. The stepmother had been made heir to a sixth of the property. In J. B. Firth's 1900 translation, Pliny reports the result: "in two courts we were victorious, and in two we were beaten." He then says the stepmother lost. A man named Suberinus, disinherited by his own father, had also claimed this estate, and he lost too. Pliny remarks that the same judges and the same advocates gave opposite verdicts on the same day. The letter does not say how the four verdicts were reconciled or what share of the estate Attia finally received. No later record of the estate survives.