Within the town lewd ruffians in their stead
Rule it at random. Such is our disgrace.
May Zeus confound the Cypselising race!"—(F.)
Breathing from his heart this curse against the policy of the Corinthians above referred to, and conveniently named after the usurper who founded the system, Theognis soon retired to Thebes, as a state which, from its open sympathy with the politics of the banished Megarians, would be likeliest to offer them an asylum, and to connive at their projects for recovering their native city by force or subtlety. The first glimpse we have of him at Thebes is characteristic of the man in more ways than one. At the house of a noble host, his love of music led him to an interference with, or a rivalry of, the hired music-girl Argyris and her vocation, which provoked the gibes of the glee-maiden, and possibly lowered him in the estimation of the company. But the love of music and song, which led him into the scrape, sufficed also to furnish him with a ready and extemporised retort to the girl's insinuation that perhaps his mother was a flute-player (and, by implication, a slave)—a retort which he, no doubt, astonished his audience by singing to his own accompaniment:—
Shelter to one from home and country driven.
A truce to jests: my parents mock thou not,
For thine, not mine, girl, is the slavish lot.
Full many an ill the exile has to brave:
This good I clasp, that none can call me slave,
