Thus Cicero, in the Tusculans, after a description of the battles of the Spartan youths, carried on not only with fists and feet, but with nails and teeth, asks, _Quæ barbaria India (~al.~ barbaries Indica) vastior atque agrestior?_ We also find in Suidas the phrase Ἀργεῖοι φῶρες, and this explanation: Ἐπὶ τῶν προδήλως πονηρῶν· οἱ γὰρ Ἀργεῖοι ἐπὶ κλοπῇ κωμῳδοῦνται. Ἀριστοφάνης Ἀναγύρῳ. No part of this play remains, so that we are left to general reasoning: but it seems a most natural explanation of this proverb or phrase, that the word Ἀργεῖος, meaning wild and savage, should be applied to banditti: theft in the early stages of society, always frequenting solitary places, as in the later ones, it rather draws to the most crowded haunts of men. Again, Æschines, in the Περὶ Παραπρεσβείας, brings the grossest personal charges against Demosthenes, for offences, which he says had brought upon him various nicknames. Among these, he thus accuses him: Ἐκ παιδῶν δὲ ἀπαλλαττόμενος, καὶ δεκαταλάντους δίκας ἑκαστῷ τῶν ἐπιτρόπων λαγχάνων, Ἄργας ἐκλήθη. This passage is noticed by both Suidas and Hesychius under Ἀργὰς, and it is explained ὄνομα ὀφέως. A serpent, either generally or of some particular kind, had, it seems, the name of Ἀργὰς, which we can easily derive from ἄργος, taken in the same sense as that in which it became the name of Argus the spy. ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field[691].’ But this does not seem to satisfy the intention of the highly vituperative passage in Æschines. This imputation of extreme cleverness or craft would not have been perhaps a very effective one in Greece. I think he more probably means to call Demosthenes a swindler or plunderer, _homo trium literarum_, from whom his guardians were trying to recover, and who was likely to be exposed, not like the serpent, to get off: and in this sense the word Ἀργὰς at once attaches itself to the reported passage in Aristophanes, and through that to the old meaning of _agrestis_ or Ἀργεῖος. Nor is Ἀργεῖος, a thief, more remote in sense from Ἀργεῖος, a rural settler, than is _paganus_, an idolater, from _paganus_, a villager.