1
When I told her what had happened and explained that Athenogenes was rude to me and unwilling to come to any reasonable agreement, she said that he was always like that and told me not to worry, as she would support me in everything herself.
2
Her manner when she said this could not have been more sincere, and she took the most solemn oaths to prove that she was thinking only of my welfare and was telling me the plain truth. So, to be quite honest with you, gentlemen of the jury, I took her at her word. That is how love, I suppose, upsets a man’s natural balance when it takes a woman as its ally. She, at any rate, by this act of wholesale trickery pocketed, as a reward for her kindness, a further three hundred drachmas, ostensibly to buy a girl.
3
Perhaps there is nothing very surprising, gentlemen of the jury, in my having been taken in like this by Antigone, a woman who was, I am told, the most gifted courtesan of her time and who has continued to practise as a procuress has ruined the house of of the deme Chollidae which was equal to any. And yet if that was how she behaved on her own, what do you think her plans are now when she has taken Athenogenes into partnership, who is a speechwriter, a man of affairs and, most significant of all, an Egyptian?
4
At all events, to make a long story short, she finally sent for me again later and said that after a long talk with Athenogenes she had with difficulty managed to persuade him to release Midas and both his sons for me for forty minas.This was a high price for three slaves. Demosthenes tells us that the total cost of his father’s fifty-two slaves (thirty-two swordsmiths and twenty couchmakers) was 230 minas, i.e., an average of just under eight pounds per head. (Dem. 27. 9.) She told me to produce the money as quickly as I could before Athenogenes changed his mind on any point.
