Towards his relatives he is the sort of man that you see; some of us he robbed of our property because he was stronger than we were, others he allowed to resort to paid employment through lack of the necessities of life. Everyone saw his mother seated in the shrine of EileithyiaThe goddess of childbirth. In his edition, Reiske (Leipzig, 1773) conjectures that the speaker is insinuating that Dicaeogenes committed incest with his own mother. and calling down upon him reproaches which I am ashamed to mention but which he was not ashamed to justify.

Amongst his intimates he deprived Melas the Egyptian, who had been his friend from youth upwards, of money which he had received from him, and is now his bitterest enemy; of his other friends some have never received back money which they lent him, others were deceived by him and did not receive what he had promised to give them if he should have the estate adjudicated to him.

And yet, gentlemen, our forefathers, who acquired and bequeathed this property, performed every kind of choregic office, contributed large sums for your expenses in war, and never ceased acting as trierarchs. As evidence of all these services they set up in the temples out of the remainder of their property,The expenses would be incurred in providing monuments, of which the well-known Choregic Monument of Lysicrates is a speciman, to support the tripods won as prizes. as memorials of their civic worth, dedications, such as tripods which they had received as prizes for choregic victories in the temple of Dionysus, or in the shrine of Pythian Apollo.