De mercede

First of all, remember never again from that time forward to think yourself free or noble. All that— your pride of race, your freedom, your ancient lineage—you will leave outside the threshold, let me tell you, when you go in after having sold yourself into such service; for Freedom will refuse to enter with you when you go in for purposes so base and humble. So you will be a slave perforce, however distasteful you may find the name, and not the slave of one man but of many; and you will

drudge from morn till night: with hanging head, “for shameful hire.”[*](Either a variation upon Homer (cf. Odyssey19, 341: Iliad 13, 84, 21, 444-5), or a quotation from a lost epic. ) Since you were not brought up in the company of Slavery from your boyhood but made her acquaintance late and are getting your schooling from her at an advanced age, you will not be very successful or highly valuable to your master, — The memory of your freedom, stealing over you, plays the mischief with you, sometimes causing you to be skittish, and for that reason to come off badly in slavery.

Perhaps, however, you think it quite enough to establish your freedom that you are not the son of a Pyrrhias or a Zopyrion, and that you have not been sold in the market like a Bithynian by a loud-voiced auctioneer. But, my excellent friend, when the first of the month arrives and side by side with Pyrrhias and Zopyrion you stretch out your hand like the rest of the servants and take your earnings, whatever they are—that is sale! There was no need of an auctioneer in the case of a man who put himself up at auction and for a long time solicited a master.

Ah, scurvy outcast (that would be my language, above all to a self-styled philosopher), if a wrecker or a pirate had taken you at sea and were offering you for sale, would you not pity yourself for being ill-fated beyond your deserts; or if someone had laid hands upon you and were haling you off, saying that you were a slave, would you not invoke the law and make a great stir and be wrathful and shout ‘“Heavens and Earth!” at the top of your voice? Then just for a few obols, at that age when, even if you were a slave by birth, it would be high

time for you to look forward at last to liberty, have you gone and sold yourself, virtue and wisdom included ? Had you no respect, either, for all those wonderful sermons that your noble Plato and Chrysippus and Aristotle have preached in praise of freedom and in censure of servility? Are you not ashamed to undergo comparison with flatterers and loafers and buffoons; to be the only person in all that Roman throng who wears the incongruous cloak of a scholar and talks Latin with a villainous accent; to take part, moreover, in uproarious dinners, packed with human flotsam that is mostly vile? At these dinners you are vulgar in your compliments, and you drink more than is discreet. Then in the morning, roused by a bell, you shake off the sweetest of your sleep and run about town with the pack, up hill and down dale, with yesterday's mud still on your legs. Were you so in want of lupines and herbs of the field, did even the springs of cold water fail you so completely, as to bring you to this pass out of desperation ? No, clearly it was because you did not want water and lupines, but cates and meat and wine with a bouquet that you were caught, hooked like a pike in the very part that hankered for all this—in the gullet—and it served you quite right! You are confronting, therefore, the rewards of this greediness, and with your neck in a collar like a monkey you are a laughing-stock to others, but seem to yourself to be living in luxury because you can eat figs without stint. Liberty and noblesse, with all their kith and kin, have disappeared completely, and not even a memory of them abides.

Indeed, it would be lucky for you if the thing

involved only the shame of figuring as a slave _ instead of a free man, and the labour was not like that of an out-and-out servant. But see if what is required of you is any more moderate than what is required of a Dromo ora Tibius! To be sure, the purpose for which he engaged you, saying that he wanted knowledge, matters little to him; for, as the proverb says, “What has a jackass to do with a lyre?” Ah, yes, can’t you see? they are mightily consumed .with longing for the wisdom of Homer or the eloquence of Demosthenes or the sublimity of Plato, when, if their gold and ’ their silver and their worries about them should be taken out of their souls, all that remains is pride and softness and self-indulgence and sensuality and insolence and ill-breeding! Truly, he does not want you for that purpose at all, but as you have a long beard, present a distinguished appearance, are neatly dressed in a Greek mantle, and everybody knows you for a grammarian or a rhetorician or a philosopher, it seems to him the proper thing to have a man of that sort among those who go before him and form his escort; it will make people think him a devoted student of Greek learning and in general a person of taste in literary matters So the chances are, my worthy friend, that instead of your marvellous lectures it is your beard and mantle that you have let for hire.