Listen, Klotho. There is something I should like to say to you in private without witnesses. You others step aside a moment. If you will give me a chance to run away I promise to give you this day a million dollars in coin of the realm.
You are absurd. Can you not get gold and dollars out of your head yet?
I will throw in the two bowls, if
you like, that I got when I killed Kleakritos.
kam
Drag him in, for apparently he will not embark of his own will.
I call you people to witness that my wall and my dockyards are unfinished. I could have completed them if I had lived five days longer.
Never mind. Some one else will build them.
Anyhow, this one thing it is perfectly reasonable to ask for.
What is that?
To come to life long enough to subdue the Persians, and impose taxes on the Lydians, and raise a huge monument to myself, inscribing on it how many great and warlike deeds I did in my lifetime.
My man, this is not asking for a single day any longer, but to spend about twenty years.
I am ready, moreover, to furnish sureties for my quickness and my reappearance. If you wish it, I will even provide you a substitute in my place in the person of my one beloved son.
You wretch, him whom you have often prayed you might leave behind you?
That used to be my prayer, but
now I see the better course.
He, too, will join you soon, slain by the new king.
Well, but do not refuse me this thing at any rate, Fate.
What is it?
I wish to know what the course of events will be after me.
You shall, for your knowledge will be an added torment. Midas the slave will have your wife; he has been her lover this long time.
The villain! It was by her persuasion that I gave him his freedom.
Your daughter will be counted among the harem of the present monarch. Your portraits and statues, which the city erected for you in times past, will all be overturned, a laughingstock to the beholders.
Tell me, is not one of my friends moved to anger by these acts?
Why, who was a friend to you? What reason had any one to be? You know that all of them, those who bowed before you and those who extolled your every word and deed, acted from fear or hope, being friendly to your office and having an eye to the main chance.
And yet they used to pour out
their libations at the banquets, and pray with a
loud voice that many good things might befall me,
saying that every one of them was ready to die
Accordingly, it was after dining with one of them that you died yesterday. For that last cup that was handed to you sent you here.
That is why I tasted something bitter! What was his object in doing it?
You ask too many questions when you ought to be embarking.
There is one thing that chokes me most of all, Klotho, and makes me long to rise to the light again, if but for a moment.
What is this? It must be something tremendous.
Karion, my slave, as soon as he saw I was dead, came late in the evening into the room where I was lying, without any trouble, for no one was so much as watching by me, and looked at me and said, "You wretched little creature, you gave me a blow many a time when I didn't deserve it." With these words he fell to plucking out my hair and beating me to his heart's content, and finally he spat upon me and went off, saying, "Go to the devil!" I was aflame with rage, but all the same I could not do anything to him, stiff and cold as I was. But if I could get hold of him—