Presents were of course a common way of trying to win favour. It was reckoned shameful for boys to take money from their lovers, but fashion permitted them to accept gifts of quails and fighting cocks, pheasants, horses, dogs and clothes.[129] There existed, therefore, at Athens frequent temptations for boys of wanton disposition, or for those who needed money to indulge expensive tastes. The speech of Æschines, from which I have already frequently quoted, affords a lively picture of the Greek rake's progress, in which Timarchus is described as having sold his person in order to gratify his gluttony and lust and love of gaming. The whole of this passage,[130] it may be observed in passing, reads like a description of Florentine manners in a sermon of Savonarola. The shops of the barbers, surgeons, perfumers, and flower-sellers had an evil notoriety, and lads who frequented these resorts rendered themselves liable to suspicion. Thus Æschines accuses Timarchus of having exposed himself for hire in a surgeon's shop at the Peiræus; while one of Straton's most beautiful epigrams[131] describes an assignation which he made with a boy who had attracted his attention in a garland-weaver's stall. In a fragment from the _Pyraunos_ of Alexis, a young man declares that he found thirty professors of the "voluptuous life of pleasure," in the Cerameicus during a search of three days; while Cratinus and Theopompus might be quoted to prove the ill fame of the monument to Cimon and the hill of Lycabettus.[132] The last step in the downward descent was when a youth abandoned the roof of his parents or guardians and accepted the hospitality of a lover.[133] If he did this, he was lost. In connection with this portion of the subject, it may be well to state that the Athenian law recognised contracts made between a man and boy, even if the latter were of free birth, whereby the one agreed to render up his person for a certain period and purpose, and the other to pay a fixed sum of money.[134] The phrase "a boy who has been a prostitute," occurs quite naturally in Aristophanes;[135] nor was it thought disreputable for men to engage in these _liaisons_. Disgrace only attached to the free youth who gained a living by prostitution; and he was liable, as we shall see, at law to loss of civil rights.