THE ABYDENES.
What has become of that luxurious
Ionia, with the sumptuous supper-tables?
Tell me, how does it fare?
And the people of Abydus (and Abydus is a colony of Miletus) are very luxurious in their way of life, and wholly enervated by pleasure; as Hermippus tells us, in his Soldiers—
A. I do rejoice when I behold an army
From o'er the sea,—to see how soft they are
And delicate to view, with flowing hair,
And well-smooth'd muscles in their tender arms.
B. Have you heard Abydus has become a man?
And Aristophanes, in his Triphales, ridiculing (after the fashion of the comedians) many of the Ionians, says—
Then all the other eminent foreigners
Who were at hand, kept following steadily,
And much they press'd him, begging he would take
The boy with him to Chios, and there sell him:
Another hoped he'd take him to Clazomenæ;
A third was all for Ephesus; a fourth
Preferred Abydus on the Hellespont:
And all these places in his way did lie.
But concerning the people of Abydus, Antipho, in reply to the attacks of Alcibiades, speaks as follows:—"After you had been considered by your guardians old enough to be your own master, you, receiving your property from their hands, went away by sea to Abydus,—not for the purpose of transacting any private business of your own, nor on account of any commission of the state respecting any public rights of hospitality; but, led only by your own lawless and intemperate disposition, to learn lascivious habits and actions from the women at Abydus, in order that you might be able to put them in practice during the remainder of your life."
29. The Magnesians also, who lived on the banks of the Mæander, were undone because they indulged in too much luxury, as Callinus relates in his Elegies; and Archilochus confirms this: for the city of Magnesia was taken by the Ephesians. And concerning these same Ephesians, Democritus, who was himself an Ephesian, speaks in the first book of his treatise on the Temple of Diana at Ephesus; where, relating their excessive effeminacy, and the dyed garments which they used to wear, he uses these expressions:—"And as for the violet and purple robes of the Ionians, and their
