I should have named those who have employed
the word before our time, were I not certain to
disturb you in this way also, by reciting names of
poets and rhetoricians and historians that would be
foreign to you, and beyond your ken. No, I shall not
name those who have used it, for they are known to
all; but do you point me out one of the ancients who
has not employed the word and your statue shall be
set up, as the saying goes, in gold at Olympia.
Indeed, any old man, full of years, who is unacquainted
with such expressions is not, I think, even aware
that the city of Athens is in Attica, Corinth at the
Isthmus, and Sparta in the Peloponnese.
 
It remains, perhaps, for you to say that you knew
the word, but criticised the inappropriate use of it.
Come now, on this point too I shall respond to you
fittingly, and you must pay attention, unless not
knowing matters very little to you. The ancients
were before me in hurling many such taunts at the
like of you, each at the men of their day; for in that
time too there were, of course, dirty fellows, disgusting traits, and ungentle dispositions. One man
called a certain person “Buskin,” comparing his
principles, which were adaptable, to that kind of
footwear; another called a man “Rampage” because
he was a turbulent orator and disturbed the assembly,
and another someone else “Seventh Day” because
he acted in the assemblies as children do on the



 

seventh day of the month, joking and making fun
and turning the earnestness of the people into jest. The nickname “Buskin” was given to Theramenes. “Seventh Day” cannot be identified, and the other nickname is corrupted in the Greek text. 
Will you not, then, in the name of Adonis, permit
me to compare an utterly vile fellow, familiar with
every form of iniquity, to a disreputable and inauspicious day? Stripped of its manifest disingenuousness (for comparison includes both simile and metaphor, and the use of simile would have been entirely unexceptionable), this amounts to defending what he said as Ry legitimate use of metaphor, like calling a man “Buskin.’? The argument would be valid if he had called the man “Apophras hémera!’’ But since we may safely say that he addressed him or spoke about him simply as “apophras,” the examples are not parallel, despite the speciousness of “hebdomas” (“Seventh Day”), formally identical with “apophras.” The one locution, however, is metaphor, because “day” is understood; in the other, that is not the case, and instead of metaphor what we have to do with is an application of the adjective grammatically incorrect and really justifiable only by pleading previous use—which might have been done by adducing Eupolis (see § 1, note).