Letter 3
To his Brother
Aeschines had already been interred three days when his niece came
to visit his tomb for the first time. Custom, you know, does not permit girls to attend
funerals once they are engaged to be married. However, even then she was dressed in
purple, with a diaphanous veil over her hair, and she had decked herself with gold and
precious stones that she might not be a sign of evil omen to her betrothed. Seated upon a
chair with double cushions and silver feet, so they say, she railed against the
untimeliness of this misfortune, on the ground that Aeschines should have died either
before her wedding or after it, and she was angry with us because we were in grief.
Scarcely waiting for the seventh day, on which we had met for the funeral banquet, she
mounted her mule car, in company with that talkative old nurse of hers, and, when the
forum was thronged, set out on her stately course for Teucheira with all her adornments.
Next week she is preparing to display herself crowned with fillets, and
with a towering head-dress like Cybele.
We are in no way wronged by this except in the fact, patent to the
whole world, that we have relations with very bad taste. The one who has been wronged in
Harmonius the father of her janitor, as Sappho might say, a man who although wise and
moderate in all respects in his own life, vied with Cecrops himself on the ground of noble
birth. The granddaughter of this man, himself greater than Cecrops, her uncle and janitor
Herodes has now given away to the Sosiae and Tibii. Perchance they are right who extol the
bride-groom to elect to us because of his mother, pointing to his descent from the famous
Lais. Now Lais was an Hyccarian slave brought from Sicily, according to one historian;
whence this mother of fair offspring, who bore the famous man. She of old lived an
irregular life of a shipmaster for her owner-- afterwards with an orator, who also owned
her, and after these in the third instance with a fellow-slave, at first secretly in the
town, then conspicuously, and was a mistress of her art. When by reason of oncoming
wrinkles she gave up the practice of her art, she trained in her calling the young persons
whom she palmed off on strangers. Her son, the orator, asserts that he is dispensed by the
law from the duty of supporting a mother who is beyond the pale. Out upon such a law! The
mother has been clearly revealed to those thus born: it is only the other parent that is
doubtful. All the care that is due to both parents from those born in wedlock should be
bestowed by the fatherless on the mother alone.