A Roman soldier came home from war to find that his father, told he was dead, had willed the family estate to others

Cicero's dialogue On the Orator, set in 91 BC, has the advocate Crassus cite the case of "the soldier, of whose death a false report was brought home from the army". The father believed the report and named another heir in his will. The father died. The soldier came home and sued for his inheritance before the centumviri, Rome's court for inheritance cases. Valerius Maximus tells the same story in his chapter on overturned wills. When the son returned after the war, the new heirs, friends of the father, shut him out of his own home. He sued before the centumviral court, and the judges voted for him unanimously. Neither writer names the soldier or the heirs. A 2015 study of the ten cases in On the Orator 1.175 to 184 argues that they read as famous trials but also match exercises taught in rhetoric schools, so the soldier's case may be a teaching case built on a real one. Valerius puts it first in his chapter on overturned wills. Neither source records the size of the estate or what became of it.