Against Athenogenes

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. 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. 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 . . .