3
And yet it is idle, no doubt, and superfluous to deal frankly with you by way of education; for in the first place you yourself could never improve in response to my censure, any more than a tumble-bug could be persuaded not to roll those balls of his any longer, when once he has become used to them.On the habits of the tumble-bug, or dung-beetle, soe the beginning of the Peace of Aristophanes. In the second place, I do not believe that anyone exists who still is ignorant of your brazen performances and of the sins that you, an old man, have committed against yourself. You are not to that extent secure or unobserved in your iniquity. There is no need of anyone to strip away your lion’s skin that you may be revealed a donkey, unless perhaps someone has just come to us from the Hyperboreans, or is sufficiently CymaeanCf. Runaways, 13. not to know, as soon as he sees you, that you are the most unbridled of all asses, without waiting to hear you bray. Your doings have been noised abroad so long a time, so far ahead of me, so universally and so repeatedly; and you have no slight reputation for them, surpassing Ariphrades, surpassing the Sybarite Hemitheon, surpassing the notorious Chian, Bastas, that adept in similar matters.Ariphrades was an Athenian whom Aristophanes pilloried for perverted relations with women, The Sybarite Hemitheon (or Minthon; see the critical note) is alluded to as the author of an obscene book in the Ignorant Book-Collector, 23 (III, 203) and perhaps also in Ovid (Trist., II, 417: qui composuit nuper Sybaritica), but the name is not given there. Bastas was a nickname applied to Democritus of Chios, a musician, by Eupolis in the Baptae (Fr. 81 Kock).
3
Nevertheless, I must speak of them, even if I shall seem to be telling stale news, in order that I may not bear the blame of being the only one who does not know about them. But no!
