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Their enemies, who were numerous and lively, make the obvious accusations about the hetairae, and cite an alleged letter of the Master to Leontion. Probably the letter is a forgery: we are definitely informed that there was a collection of such forgeries, made in order to damage Epicurus.
And cakes by female hands wrought artfully, Well steep'd in th' liquor of the gold-wing'd bee; and besides all this, handsome young lassies too, such as Leontion, Boidion, Hedia, and Nicedion, that were wont to roam about in Epicurus's philosophic garden.
Neither doth it befit men of continence and sobriety to exercise their thoughts about such poor things, or to do what one twitted Carneades with, to reckon, as out of a diurnal, how oft they have lain with Hedia or Leontion, or where they last drank Thasian wine, or at what twentieth-day feast they had a costly supper.
And not only free women, but women with names that show that they were slaves, Leontion, Nikidion, Mammarion. They were hetairae; perhaps victims of war, like many of the unfortunate heroines in the New Comedy; free women from conquered cities, who had been sold in the slave market or reduced to misery as refugees, and to whom now the Garden afforded a true and spiritual refuge.
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