previous next
[20] since he has had the face to deny one part of his debt and, after finally confessing to the rest, to make out a sum of seven talents of silver and seven thousand drachmae as receipts and expenses on account of two boys and their sister during eight years. So gross is his impudence that, not knowing how he should enter the sums spent, he reckoned for the viands of the two young boys and their sister five obols a day1; for shoes, laundry and hairdressing he kept no monthly or yearly account, but he shows it inclusively, for the whole period, as more than a talent of silver.

1 At this period the daily cost of food for an adult could be reckoned at one obol: in the present case, for the food (other than cereal) of three children, the charge of five obols is at least twice what it should be. A more reasonable scale is suggested by the speaker at Lys. 32.28 below.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1930)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (6 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: