Apollodorus Against Timotheus

That I did not put the deposition in the box before the arbitrator was due to a trick of Antiphanes, who kept saying that he would give evidence for me on the day set for the decision; but when the hearing was in progress before the arbitrator, although he was summoned from his house (for he was nowhere to be seen), he was persuaded by Timotheus to fail to appear as a witness. On my depositing a drachma in his name on a charge of failing to appear, as the law prescribes, the arbitrator did not make an award against the defendant, but decided in his favor, and then went off, for it was already late.

Now, however, I have entered suit on my own account for damages against Antiphanes because he neither gave testimony for me, nor asked under oath for a postponement, as the law provides. And I demand of him that he get up and state under oath before you, first, whether he lent Timotheus a thousand drachmae in Calaureia, and secondly, whether Philip received here payment of that sum from my father.

The defendant himself practically admitted before the arbitrator that my father paid Philip the thousand drachmae; but he declared that it was not to him (Timotheus) that my father lent the money, but to the Boeotian admiral, who, he alleges, gave some copper as security for the sum. However, that in this he was not stating the truth, but that he borrowed the money himself and is seeking to avoid payment, I shall prove to you, when I shall have informed you in detail regarding his other debts also.

In the month Maimacterion[*](Maimacterion corresponds to the latter half of November and the prior half of December.) in the archonship of Asteius,[*](The archonship of Asteius falls in 373-372 B.C.) Alcetas and Jason came to visit Timotheus to be present at his trial and give him their support, and they arrived at his house in Peiraeus in the Hippodameia[*](This was an agora built by the architect Hippodamus.) when it was already evening. Being at a loss how to entertain them, he sent his body servant Aeschrion to my father and bade him ask for the loan of some bedding and cloaks and two silver bowls and to borrow a mina of silver.

And my father, hearing from Aeschrion, the body-servant of the defendant, that they had arrived and the urgent need for which the request was made, both supplied the objects for which the slave had come and lent the mina of silver which he asked to borrow. Well, when he had been acquitted of the charge, the defendant found himself in sore straits for money to pay his private debts and the taxes to the state, and my father, seeing this, did not venture to demand repayment of the money at once;

for, while he did not think that Timotheus would defraud him when he had the means to pay, he did not himself see any way to exact payment from him when he was without means. So, after the departure of Alcetas and Jason, Aeschrion, the defendant’s body-servant, brought back the bedding and the cloaks, but he did not return the two bowls, for which he had asked at the time he borrowed the bedding and the mina of silver., when Alcetas and Jason arrived at the defendant’s house.