83
When Theogenes had made this promise and this plea, the council of the Areopagus, through compassion also for the guilelessness of his character and in the belief that he had really been deceived by Stephanus, refrained from action. And Theogenes immediately on coming down from the Areopagus cast out of his house the woman, the daughter of this Neaera, and expelled this man Stephanus, who had deceived him, from the board of magistrates. Thus it was that the members of the Areopagus desisted from their action against Theogenes and from their anger against him; for they forgave him, because he had been deceived.
84
To prove the truth of these statements of mine, I will call before you as witness to these facts Theogenes himself, and will compel him to testify.
84
(To the clerk.) Call, please, Theogenes of Erchia.Erchia, a deme of the tribe Aegeïs; but see note a on Dem. 59.72.
84
The Deposition
84
Theogenes of Erchia deposes that when he was king he married Phano, believing her to be the daughter of Stephanus, and that, when he found he had been deceived, he cast the woman away and ceased to live with her, and that he expelled Stephanus from his post of assessor, and no longer allowed him to serve in that capacity.
85
(To the clerk.) Now take, please, the law bearing upon these matters, and read it; for I would have you know that a woman of her character, who has done what she has done, ought not only to have kept aloof from these sacred rites, to have abstained from beholding them, from offering sacrifices, and from performing on the city’s behalf any of the ancestral rites which usage demands, but that she should have been excluded also from all other religious ceremonials in Athens. For a woman who has been taken in adultery is not permitted to attend any of the public sacrifices, although the laws have given both to the alien woman and the slave the right to attend these, whether to view the spectacle or to offer prayer.
