After this, gentlemen, there was an interval of some time, during which I remained completely unaware of my misfortunes. But then an old woman came up to me. She had been secretly sent, or so I later discovered, by a lady whom this fellow had seduced. This woman was angry and felt cheated, because he no longer visited her as before, so she watched until she found out why. The old woman kept an eye out and approached me near my house. “Euphiletus,” she said, “please do not think that I am being a busybody by making contact with you. The man who is humiliating you and your wife is an enemy of ours as well. Get hold of your slave girl, the one who does the shopping and waits on you, and torture her: you will discover everything. It is,” she continued, “Eratosthenes of the deme Oe who is doing this. He has seduced not only your wife but many others as well. He makes a hobby of it.” She said this, gentlemen, and left. At once I became alarmed. Everything came back into my mind, and I was filled with suspicion. I remembered how I had been locked in my room, and how that night both the door of the house and the courtyard door had creaked (which had never happened before), and how I had noticed that my wife had used makeup. All these things flashed into my mind, and I was full of suspicion. I returned home, and told the slave girl to come shopping with me, but I took her to the house of one of my friends and told her that I had found out everything that was going on in my house. “So it is up to you,” I said, “to choose the fate you prefer: either to be flogged and put out to work in the mill, and never have any rest from such sufferings; or else to admit the whole truth and suffer no punishment, but instead to be forgiven for your crimes. No lies now: I want the full truth.” At first she denied it and told me to do whatever I pleased, because she knew nothing. But when I mentioned the name Eratosthenes to her and declared that this was the man who was visiting my wife, she was astonished, realizing that I knew everything. She immediately fell at my knees and made me promise she would suffer no harm. She admitted, first, how he had approached her after the funeral, and then how she had eventually acted as his messenger, and how my wife had in the end been won over, and the various ways he had entered the house, and how during the Thesmophoria,1 when I was in the country, my wife had attended the shrine with his mother. She gave me a full and accurate account of everything else that had happened. When she had finished, I said, “Make sure that nobody at all hears about this; otherwise nothing in our agreement will be binding. I want you to show me them in the act. I don’t want words; I want their actions to be clearly proved, if it is really true.” She agreed to do this.