Aristides

Moreover, his tomb is pointed out at Phalerum, and they say the city constructed it for him, since he did not leave even enough to pay for his funeral. And they tell how his daughters were married from the prytaneium at the public cost, the city bestowing the dowry for the marriage and voting outright three thousand drachmas to each daughter, while to Lysimachus his son, the people gave one hundred minas in silver, as many acres of vineyard land, and besides this a pension of four drachmas per diem,

—all in a bill which was brought in by Alcibiades. And further, Lysimachus left a daughter, Polycrite, according to Callisthenes, and the people voted for her a public maintenance, in the style of their Olympic victors. Again, Demetrius the Phalerean, Hieronymus the Rhodian, Aristoxenus the Musician, and Aristotle (provided the book On Nobility of Birth is to be ranked among the genuine works of Aristotle) relate that Myrto, the granddaughter of Aristides, lived in wedlock with Socrates the Sage. He had another woman to wife, but took this one up because her poverty kept her a widow, and she lacked the necessaries of life.

To these, however, Panaetius, in his work on Socrates, has made sufficient reply. And the Phalerean says, in his Socrates, that he remembers a grandson of Aristides, Lysimachus, a very poor man, who made his own living by means of a sort of dream-interpreting tablet, his seat being near the so-called Iaccheium. To this man’s mother and to her sister, Demetrius persuaded the people to give, by formal decree, a pension of three obols per diem; though afterwards, in his capacity of sole legislator, he himself, as he says, assigned a drachma instead of three obols to each of the women.

It is not to be wondered at that the people took such thought for families in the city, since on learning that the granddaughter of Aristogeiton was living humbly in Lemnos, unmarried because of her poverty, they brought her back to Athens, consorted her with a well-born man, and gave her the estate in Potamus for her dowry. For such humanity and benevolence, of which the city still gives illustrious examples even in my own day, she is justly admired and lauded.