the citizens. For he pulled down all the enclosures of his gardens and grounds, that strangers, and the needy of his fellow-citizens, might gather of his fruits freely. At home, he kept a table, plain, but sufficient for a considerable number; to which any poor townsman had free access, and so might support himself without labor, with his whole time left free for public duties. Aristotle states, however, that this reception did not extend to all the Athenians, but only to his own fellow townsmen, the Laciadæ.[1] Besides this, he always went attended by two or three young companions, very well clad; and if he met with an elderly citizen in a poor habit, one of these would change clothes with the decayed citizen, which was looked upon as very nobly done. He enjoined them, likewise, to carry a considerable quantity of coin about them, which they were to convey silently into the hands of the better class of poor men, as they stood by them in the market-place. This, Cratinus the poet speaks of in one of his comedies, the Archilochi:—
For I, Metrobius too, the scrivener poor,
Of ease and comfort in my age secure,
By Greece's noblest son in life's decline,
Cimon, the generous-hearted, the divine,
Well-fed and feasted hoped till death to be,
Death which, alas! has taken him ere me.
Gorgias the Leontine gives him this character, that he got riches that he might use them, and used them that
- ↑ Every Athenian citizen belonged, as such, to a particular town or township, one of the demi, of which there were above a hundred in Attica, in the latest times one hundred and seventy-four, all distinct localities; but, as a man, wherever he lived, continued to belong to his father's township, the relation was not strictly a local, but rather a personal one. The town-meetings were all held in Athens. Politically, the demi were, perhaps, hardly more than wards for registration, but socially, by connecting every man with a particular district, the institution seems to have exercised a good deal of practical influence. Cimon's town, Lacia, or the Laciadæ, was just out of Athens, on the road to Eleusis.
