To be near the Agora was a desideratum. The cripple, in Lysias’s oration, asking the Senate to continue his pension, refers to the fact that every one in Athens has his favourite lounging place: “One frequents the perfume-seller’s, another the barber’s, another the cobbler’s; and as a rule the most of them lounge into the shops set up nearest the Agora, and the very fewest resort to those most remote from it.” Socrates, too, seeking his audience where the crowds gravitated, was often heard talking “in the Market-place near the bankers’ tables.” Aristophanes, together with the other comic writers, and Lysias and Theophrastus tell not only of other resorts—like the fuller’s shop, the shield-and-spear-maker’s—but of many special sub-markets. Thus there were by the Agora the “Pottery” and the “Vegetable” Market, and, somewhere near, the “Green-cheese,” the “Garlic,” the “Wine,” the “Oil,” the “Fish” markets. Of the Bird-market we hear in some detail in Aristophanes,—the live pigeons in cages, strings of ortolans, thrushes abnormally inflated, and blackbirds with “feathers shamefully inserted in their nostrils”! In time of war the country folk thronged into town to escape the armies that were devastating Attica. In times of peace, too, they came trooping in on the first of the month, and to the oft-recurring festivals. Menander, with his blended Stoicism and Epicureanism, looks around in the crowded Agora and compares human life to a festival or market-fair:— “That man, O Parmeno, I count most fortunate Who quickly whence he came returns, when he, unvexed, Has looked on these majestic sights—the common sun, Water and clouds, the stars and fire. If thou shalt live An hundred years, or if a very few, thou’lt always see These same sights present, grander ones thou’lt ne’er behold. So reckon thou this time I’m speaking of as though Some market-fair or trip to town, where one may see The crowd, the market, dice and loungers’ haunts; Then, if thou’rt first unto thy lodgings, with more gold Thou’lt go upon thy travels and shalt pick no brawl; While he that tarries longer, worn, his money gone, Grows old and wretched, and forever knows some lack, A wandering vagrant finding enemies and plots, And gains no death that’s easy, staying out his time.”