the same social grade as her husband; a "metic" perhaps, or half-caste, with pure Athenian blood on one side only. But that Clito was ever a herb-woman, kept a greengrocer's stall, or hawked fruit and flowers about the streets, is doubtless a tale devised by her son's ill-wishers. Demosthenes, the orator's father, was a master cutler, and, as his son's suit against his knavish guardians shows, drove a brisk trade in swords, spearheads, knives, and shears; but it does not therefore follow that either the orator or his sire hammered on the anvil or blew the bellows themselves.[1] In democratic Athens there was at all times a prejudice in favour of high birth, and one of the most effective arrows in Demosthenes's quiver against Æschines was, that his rival had once been a player, that his father was a low fellow, and his mother a dancer, a fortune-teller, and an altogether disreputable person. Clito and her husband very possibly owned some garden-ground near Athens, and its produce may have for a time supplied a convenient addition to their income. The Persians can hardly have been twice quartered on Attic soil without affecting seriously the rents or dividends of its owners, and thus the parents of Euripides may have been glad to sell their vegetables.[2] To represent Clito as
- ↑ "Bleared with the glowing mass, the luckless sire
From anvils, sledges, bellows, tongs, and fire,
From tempering swords, his own more safe employ,
To study rhetoric sent his hopeful boy."
—Juvenal, Sat. x., Gifford. - ↑ One account reverses the story: according to it, Clito was "a person of quality," and Mnesarchus not a gentleman but a shopkeeper, or at least "in business."
