When he has vanquished a few stray victims here and there, his next move is to advance upon whole companies and put them to flight in the midst of their occupations. He goes upon the wrestling ground or into the schools, and prevents the boys from making progress with their lessons, so incessant is his talk with the teachers and the wrestling-masters.
If you say you are going home, he’s pretty sure to come along and escort you to your house.
Whenever he learns the day set for the session of the Assembly he noises it diligently abroad, and recalls Demosthenes’s famous bout with Aeschines in the archonship of Aristophon. He mentions, too, his own humble effort on a certain occasion, and the approval which it won among the people. As he rattles on he launches invectives against the masses, in such fashion that his audience either becomes oblivious or begins to doze, or else melts away in the midst of his harangue.
When he’s on a jury he’s an obstacle to reaching a verdict, when he’s in the theatre he prevents attention to the play; at a feast he hinders eating, remarking that silence is too much of an effort, that his tongue is hung in the middle, and that he couldn’t keep still, even though he should seem a worse chatterer than a magpie; and when he’s made a butt by his own children, he submits,—when in their desire to go to sleep they say, “Papa, tell us something, in order that sleep may come.”
XVIII The Rough
(Ἀπόνοια)
Roughness is coarse conduct, whether in word or act. The rough takes an oath lightly and is insensible to insult and ready to give it. In character he is a sort of town bully, obscene in manner, ready for anything and everything. He is willing, sober and without a mask, to dance the vulgar cordax[26] in comic chorus. At a show he goes around from man to man and collects the pennies, quarrelling with the spectators who present a pass and therefore insist on seeing the performance free.
He is the sort of man to keep a hostelry,[27] or brothel, or to farm the taxes. There is no business he considers beneath him, but he is ready to follow the trade of crier, cook, or gambler. He does not support his mother, is caught at theft and spends more time in jail than in his home. He is the type of man who collects a crowd of bystanders and harangues them in a loud brawling voice; while he is talking, some are going and others coming, without listening to him; to one part of the moving crowd he tells the beginning of his story, to another part a sketch of it, and to another part a mere fragment. He regards a holiday as the fittest time for the full exhibition of his roughness.