On the Property of Aristophanes: Against the Treasury

And nobody can say that there was malversation, or that the accounts were not fairly rendered: for he made his dispositions himself in his illness, while his mind was sound. Please call witnesses to this.

WitnessesWhy, surely anyone, gentlemen, before the amounts of the two had been revealed, would have thought that the property of Nicophemus was a mere fraction of that of Conon. Now, Aristophanes had acquired a house with land for more than five talents, had produced dramas on his own account and on his father’s at a cost of five thousand drachmae,[*](50 minae.) and had spent eighty minae[*](1 talent and 20 minae.) on equipping warships;

on account of the two, no less than forty minae have been contributed to special levies; for the Sicilian expedition he spent a hundred minae,[*](1 talent and 40 minae.) and for commissioning the warships, when the Cypriots came and you gave them the ten vessels, he supplied thirty thousand drachmae[*](5 talents.) to pay the light infantry and purchase their arms. The total of all these sums amounts to little short of fifteen talents.

Hence you can have no reason to lay blame on us, since the property of Conon, which is admitted to have been fairly accounted for by the owner himself, and was thought to be many times more than that of Aristophanes, is found to be less than thrice the amount of his. And we are omitting from the calculation all that Nicophemus held himself in Cyprus, where he had a wife and a daughter.