Against Athenogenes (6-10)

But this is the chief advantage: under the present arrangement they would think that it was I who had freed them; whereas, if you buy them formally first and then liberate them afterwards at your leisure, they will be doubly grateful to you. However, he said, you will become responsible for what money they owe: a debt for some sweet oil to Pancalus and Procles[*] and any other sums which customers have invested in the perfumery in the ordinary course. It is a trifling amount and much more than counterbalanced by the stocks in the shop, sweet oil, scent-boxes, myrrh (and he mentioned the names of some other things), which will easily cover all the debts.

There, so it seems, gentlemen of the jury, lay the catch, the real point of the elaborate plot. For if I used the money to buy their freedom I was simply losing whatever I gave him without suffering any serious harm. But if I bought them formally and agreed to take over their debts assuming, since I had no previous information, that these were negligible, he meant to set all his creditors and contributors[*] on me, using the agreement as a trap.

And that is just what he did. For when I accepted his proposals he immediately took a document from his lap and began to read the contents, which were the text of an agreement with me. I listened to it being read, but my attention was concentrated on completing the business I had come for. He sealed the agreement directly in the same house, so that no one with any interest in me should hear the contents, and added with my name that of Nicon of Cephisia.

We went to the perfumery and deposited the document with Lysicles of Leuconoe, and I put down the forty minas and so made the purchase. When this was settled I was visited by the creditors, to whom Midas owed money, and the contributors too, who talked things over with me. In three months all the debts had been declared, with the result that, including repayment of contributions, I owed, as I said just now, about five talents.

When I realized what a plight I was in, at long last I called together my friends and relatives and we read the copy of the agreement in which the names of Pancalus and Polycles[*] were expressly written with the statement that certain sums were owing to them for sweet oil. These were small amounts, and they were justified in saying that the oil in the shop was equal in value to the money. But the majority of the debts, including the largest, were not given specifically; they were mentioned as an unimportant item in a sort of footnote which ran: