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They had to omit the solemn procession at the feast of Bacchus, as upon the very day of its celebration there was such a severe and rigorous frost, coming quite out of its time, that not only the vines and fig-trees were killed, but almost all the wheat was destroyed in the blade. Accordingly, Philippides, an enemy to Stratocles, attacked him in a comedy, in the following verses:
And, "adding flame to fire," as Aristophanes says, there was one who, to outdo Stratocles, proposed, that it should be decreed, that whensoever Demetrius should honor their city with his presence, they should treat him with the same show of hospitable entertainment, with which Ceres and Bacchus are received; and the citizen who exceeded the rest in the splendor and costliness of his reception should have a sum of money granted him from the public purse to make a sacred offering.
But the wildest proposal was one made by Stratocles, the great inventor of all these ingenious and exquisite compliments, enacting that the members of any deputation that the city should send to Demetrius or Antigonus should have the same title as those sent to Delphi or Olympia for the performance of the national sacrifices in behalf of the state, at the great Greek festivals.
But it signified nothing, for Stratocles at once proposed that the month of Munychion, then current, should by edict be reputed to be the month of Anthesterion; which being voted and done, and Demetrius thereby admitted to the lesser ceremonies, by another vote they turned the same month of Munychion into the other month of Boedromion; the celebration of the greater mysteries ensued, and Demetrius was fully admitted.
For Stratocles was well rewarded for his flatteries; and the saying was remembered against Demochares, who was soon after sent into banishment. So fared the Athenians, after being relieved of the foreign garrison, and recovering what was called their liberty.
This Stratocles was, in all respects, an audacious and abandoned character, and seemed to have made it his object to copy, by his buffoonery and impertinence, Cleon's old familiarity with the people. His mistress, Phylacion, one day bringing him a dish of brains and neckbones for his dinner, "Oh," said he, "I am to dine upon the things which we statesmen play at ball with."
But being informed that Demetrius resented this as a great indignity, they not only rescinded in alarm the former order, but put some of the proposers and advisers of it to death and banished others, and furthermore enacted and decreed, that whatsoever king Demetrius should in time to come ordain, should be accounted right towards the gods and just towards men; and when one of the better class of citizens said Stratocles must be mad to use such words, Demochares of Leuconoe observed, he would be a fool not to be mad.
These proceedings gave the comedian, Philippides, a new occasion to exercise his wit upon Stratocles, whose flattering fear Into one month hath crowded all the year. And on the vote that Demetrius should lodge in the Parthenon, Who turns the temple to a common inn, And makes the Virgin's house a house of sin.
Presently after came those who brought home the wrecks from the battle; and when the people exclaimed at what he had done, he came boldly to face the outcry, and asked what harm there had been in giving them two days' pleasure. Such was Stratocles.
"You may use your pleasure," replied Atticus with a smile: "for it is the privilege of rhetoricians to exceed the truth of history, that they may have an opportunity of embellishing the fate of their heroes: and accordingly, Clitarchus and Stratocles have entertained us with the same pretty fiction about the death of Themistocles, which you have invented for Coriolanus.
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