De mercede

"Where shall I make a beginning,” my friend, “and where make an end of relating”[*](Cf. Odyssey9, 14. ) all that must be done and suffered by those who take salaried posts and are put on trial in the friendship of our wealthy men—if the name of friendship may be applied to that sort of slavery on their part? Iam familiar with much, I may say most, of their experiences, not because I myself have ever tried anything of that kind, for it never became a necessity for me to try it, and, ye gods! I pray it never may ; but many of those who have blundered into this existence have talked to me freely, some, who were still in their misery, bewailing the many bitter sufferings which they were then undergoing, and others, who had broken jail, as it were, recalling not without pleasure those they had undergone ; in fact they joyed in recounting what they had escaped from.

These latter were the more trustworthy because they had gone through all the degrees of the ritual, so to speak, and had been initiated into everything from beginning to end. So it was not without interest and attention that I listened to them while they spun yarns about their shipwreck and unlooked-for deliverance, just like the men with shaven heads who gather in crowds at the temples and tell of third waves, tempests, headlands, strandings, masts carried

away, rudders broken, and to cap it all, how the T win Brethren appeared (they are peculiar to this sort of rhodomontade), or how some other deus ex machina sat on the masthead or stood at the helm and steered the ship to a soft beach where she might break up gradually and slowly and they themselves get ashore safely by the grace and favour of the god. Those men, to be sure, invent the greater part of their tragical histories to meet their temporary need, in order that they may receive alms from a greater number of people by seeming not only unfortunate but dear to the gods;

but when the others told of household tempests and third waves—yes, by Zeus, fifth and tenth waves, if one may say so—and how they first sailed in, with the sea apparently calm, and how many troubles they endured through the whole voyage by reason of thirst or sea-sickness or inundations of brine, and finally how they stove their unlucky lugger on a submerged ledge or a sheer pinnacle and swam ashore, poor fellows, in a wretched plight, naked and in want of every necessity—in these adventures and their account of them it seemed to me that they concealed the greater part out of shame, and voluntarily forgot it.

For my part I shall not hesitate to tell you everything, my dear Timocles, not only their stories but whatever else I find by logical inference to be characteristic of such household positions ; for I think I detected long ago that you are entertaining designs