[Footnote 16: When an individual was tried before an Athenian tribunal, his wealth was generally a serious disadvantage to his cause, and there was nothing which the defence labored harder to establish than the poverty of the accused. "I know," says the orator Lisias, in his defence of Nicophemus, "how difficult it will be effectually to refute the report of the great riches of Nicophemus. The present scarcity of money in the city, and the wants of the treasury which the forfeiture has been calculated upon to supply, will operate against me." In the celebrated dialogue of Xenophon, called the Banquet, he makes a rich man who has suddenly become poor, congratulate himself upon his poverty; "inasmuch," he says, "as cheerfulness and confidence are preferable to constant apprehension, freedom to slavery, being waited upon, to waiting upon others. When I was a rich man in this city, I was under the necessity of courting the sycophants, knowing it was in their power to do me mischief which I could little return. Nevertheless, I was continually receiving orders from the people, to undertake some expenses for the commonwealth, and I was not allowed to go any where out of Attica. But now I have lost all my foreign property, and nothing accrues from my Attic estate, and all my goods are sold, I sleep any where fearless; I am considered as faithful to the government; I am never threatened with prosecutions, but I have it in my power to make others fear; as a freeman I may stay in the country or go out of it as I please; the rich rise from their seats for me as I approach, and make way for me as I walk; I am now like a tyrant, whereas I was before an absolute slave; and whereas before I paid tribute to the people, now a tribute from the public maintains me." This picture, though perhaps overwrought, marks still but too conclusively the agrarian spirit in Greece.]