10
Both these pleas, then, being excluded, what is left me but to confess that I have no sound defence to make? I have indeed one anchor yet aboard: I may whine over age and ill health, and their attendant poverty, from which a man will purchase escape at any cost. The situation tempts me to send an invitation to Euripides’s Medea: will she come and recite certain lines of hers on my behalf, kindly making the slight changes needed?— Too well I know how monstrous is the deed; My poverty, but not my will, consents, And every one knows the place in Theognis, whether I quote it or not, where he approves of people’s flinging themselves to the unplumbed deep from sky-ypointing crags, if one may be quit of poverty that way.
