But, to make my meaning clearer on the question of maintenance, I will at this point explain in detail how the silver mines may be furnished and extended so as to render them much more useful to the state. Only I would premise that I claim no sort of admiration for anything which I am about to say, as though I had hit upon some recondite discovery. Since half of what I have to say is at the present moment still patent to the eyes of all of us, and as to what belongs to past history, if we are to believe the testimony of our fathers, (10) things were then much of a piece with what is going on now. No, what is really marvellous is that the state, with the fact of so many private persons growing wealthy at her expense, and under her very eyes, should have failed to imitate them. It is an old story, trite enough to those of us who have cared to attend to it, how once on a time Nicias, the son of Niceratus, owned a thousand men in the silver mines, (11) whom he let out to Sosias, a Thracian, on the following terms. Sosias was to pay him a net obol a day, without charge or deduction, for every slave of the thousand, and be (12) responsible for keeping up the number perpetually at that figure. So again Hipponicus (13) had six hundred slaves let out on the same principle, which brought him in a net mina (14) a day without charge or deduction. Then there was Philemonides, with three hundred, bringing him in half a mina, and others, I make no doubt there were, making profits in proportion to their respective resources and capital. (15) But there is no need to revert to ancient history. At the present moment there are hundreds of human beings in the mines let out on the same principle. (16) And given that my proposal were carried into effect, the only novelty in it is that, just as the individual in acquiring the ownership of a gang of slaves finds himself at once provided with a permanent source of income, so the state, in like fashion, should possess herself of a body of public slaves, to the number, say, of three for every Athenian citizen. (17) As to the feasibility of our proposals, I challenge any one whom it may concern to test the scheme point by point, and to give his verdict. (10) Reading {para ton pateron}, with Zurborg, after Wilamowitz- Mollendorf. (11) See "Mem." II. v. 2; Plut. "Nicias," 4; "Athen." vi. 272. See an important criticism of Boeckh's view by Cornewall Lewis, translation of "P. E. A." p. 675 foll. (12) Reading {parekhein}, or if {pareikhen}, transl. "whilst he himself kept up the number." See H. hagen in "Journ. Philol." x. 19, pp. 34-36; also Zurborg, "Comm." p. 28. (13) Son of Callias. (14) = L4:1:3 = 600 ob. (15) Or, "whose incomes would vary in proportion to their working capital." (16) See Jebb, "Theophr." xxvi. 21.