(But I wish to tell you a story very well worth your hearing, unless indeed you are already wearied by the length of this garrulous speech. Indeed it may be that you have listened without enjoyment to what has been said so far, seeing that the speaker is a layman and entirely ignorant of rhetoric, and knows neither how to invent nor how to use the writer’s craft, but speaks the truth as it occurs to him. And my story is about something almost of the present time. Now many will say, I suppose, persuaded by the accomplished sophists, that I have collected what is trivial and worthless, and relate it to you as though it were of serious import. And probably they will say this, not because they are jealous of my speeches, or because they wish to rob me of the reputation that they may bring. For they well know that I do not desire to be their rival in the art by setting my own speeches against theirs, nor in any other way do I wish to quarrel with them. But since, for some reason or other, they are ambitious of speaking on lofty themes at any cost, they will not tolerate those who have not their ambition, and they reproach them with weakening the power of rhetoric. For they say that only those deeds are to be admired and are worthy of serious treatment and repeated praise which, because of their magnitude, have been thought by some to be incredible, those stories for instance about that famous woman(592) of Assyria who turned aside as though it were an insignificant brook the river(593) that flows through Babylon, and built a gorgeous palace underground, and then turned the stream back again beyond the dykes that she had made. For of her many a tale is told, how she fought a naval battle with three thousand ships, and on land she led into the field of battle three million hoplites, and in Babylon she built a wall very nearly five hundred stades in length, and the moat that surrounds the city and other very costly and expensive edifices were, they tell us, her work. And Nitocris(594) who came later than she, and Rhodogyne(595) and Tomyris,(596) aye and a crowd of women beyond number who played men’s parts in no very seemly fashion occur to my mind. And some of them were conspicuous for their beauty and so became notorious, though it brought them no happiness, but since they were the causes of dissension and long wars among countless nations and as many men as could reasonably be collected from a country of that size, they are celebrated by the orators as having given rise to mighty deeds. And a speaker who has nothing of this sort to relate seems ridiculous because he makes no great effort to astonish his hearers or to introduce the marvellous into his speeches. Now shall we put this question to these orators, whether any one of them would wish to have a wife or daughter of that sort, rather than like Penelope? And yet in her case Homer had no more to tell than of her discretion and her love for her husband and the