"It was indeed too absurd for words. There was especially that vulgar sound _i_ constantly recurring where we never dreamt of using such a sound; and our beautiful _ypsilon_ (γ) he pronounced like the English _u_, which is like serving champagne in soup-plates. When he stumbled over an _ou_, he pronounced it with a sound to which dentists are better accustomed than any Athenian ever was, and our deep and manly _ch_ (χ) he castrated down to a lisping _k_. I remember Carians in Asia Minor who talked like that. Our noble and incomparable language, orchestral, picturesque, sculptural, became like the Palace of Minos which they are excavating at present: in its magnificent halls, eaten by weather and worm, one sees only poor labourers and here and there a directing mind. "I imagined that the good man meant by his speech to welcome me back into the world, and so when my turn to answer him came, I got up and, leaning partly on Phryne and partly on Lais, who stood near me, I replied as follows, after speaking for a little while in Attic, in the language of the country: "'It is indeed with no ordinary satisfaction that I beg to thank you, O Sophist, and you here present for the pleasant reception that you have given us. My lot has on the whole not been altogether bad. Your studious men, it is true, affect to condemn me, my policy, and my private life. Perhaps they will allow me to remark that the irregularity of my past morals is a matter of temptations. Diogenes used to tell us that one of my sternest historian-critics in Syracuse left his wife, children and house on being for once tempted by the chamber-maid of one of my passing caprices; and the historians of your race who so gravely decry a Madame de Montespan would, did Madame only smile at them, incontinently fall into a fit of hopeless moral collapse. "'But if your men write against me, irrespective of what they really feel about me, I am sure your women take a much more lenient view of the case.' "(Discreet applause.) "'They feel that ambition did not eat up all the forces of my soul, and that in worshipping Ares (Mars), I never forgot the cult of Aphrodite (Venus) either. We Hellenes ventured to be humans, and that is why now we have become demi-gods. You, my friends, do not even venture to be humans, and that is why you remain the little ones. "'I notice in the northern countries of Europe men do not, or to a very small degree care for women. Perhaps that is the reason why the Roman Catholic idea of the Holy Virgin has had no lasting hold on these nations.