On the Embassy (196-200)

Now let us compare the banquet of Satyrus with another entertainment which these men attended in Macedonia; and you shall see whether there is any sort of resemblance. These men had been invited to the house of Xenophron, a son of Phaedimus, who was one of the Thirty Tyrants, and off they went; but I declined to go. When the drinking began, Xenophron introduced an Olynthian woman,—a handsome, but a freeborn and, as the event proved, a modest girl.

At first, I believe, they only tried to make her drink quietly and eat dessert; so Iatrocles told me the following day. But as the carouse went on, and they became heated, they ordered her to sit down and give them a song. The poor girl was bewildered, for she did not wish, and she did not know how, to sing. Then Aeschines and Phryno declared that it was intolerable impertinence for a captive,—and one of those ungodly, pernicious Olynthians too,—to give herself such airs. Call a servant, they cried; bring a whip, somebody. In came a flunkey with a horsewhip, and—I suppose they were tipsy, and it did not take much to irritate them,when she said something and began to cry, he tore off her dress and gave her a number of lashes on the back.

Maddened by these indignities, she jumped to her feet, upset the table, and fell at the knees of Iatrocles. If he had not rescued her, she would have perished, the victim of a drunken orgy, for the drunkenness of this blackguard is something terrible. The story of this girl was told even in Arcadia, at a meeting of the Ten Thousand[*]; it was related by Diophantus at Athens in a report which I will compel him to repeat in evidence; and it was common talk in Thessaly and everywhere.

With all this on his conscience the unclean scoundrel will dare to look you in the face, and before long he will be declaiming in sonorous accents about his blameless life. It makes me choke with rage. As if the jury did not know all about you: first the acolyte,[*] reading the service-books while your mother performed her hocus-pocus, reeling and tumbling, child as you were, with bacchanals and tipsy worshippers;

then the junior clerk, doing the dirty work of public offices for a few shillings a month: and at last, not so long ago, the parasite of the greenrooms, eking out by sponging what you earned as a player of trumpery parts! What is the life you will claim, and where have you lived it, when such is too clearly the sort of life you really have lived? And then the assurance of the man! Bringing another man[*] before this court on a charge of unnatural crime! However, I will let that go for the present. First read these depositions.

(The Depositions are read)