Rhetorum praeceptor

“So much for your life in public and in the open. In your private life, be resolved to do anything and everything—to dice, to drink deep, to live high and to keep mistresses, or at all events to boast of it even if you do not do it, telling everyone about it and showing notes that purport to be written by women. You must aim to be elegant, you know, and take pains to create the impression that women are devoted to you. This also will be set down to the credit of your rhetoric by the public, who will infer from it that your fame extends even to the women’s quarters. And I say—do not be ashamed to have the name of being an effeminate, even if you are bearded or actually bald. There should be some who hang about you on that account, but if there are none, your slaves will answer. This helps your rhetoric in many ways; it increases your shameless-

ness and effrontery. You observe that women are more talkative, and that in calling names they are extravagant and outstrip men. Well, if you imitate them you will excel your rivals even there. Of course you must use depilatories, preferably all over, but if not, at least where most necessary. And let your mouth be open for everything indifferently; let your tongue serve you not only in your speeches, but in any other way it can. And it can not only solecize and barbarize, not only twaddle and forswear, call names and slander and lie—it can perform other services even at night, especially if your love affairs are too numerous. Yes, that must know everything, be lively, and balk at nothing.

“If you thoroughly learn all this, my lad—and you can, for there is nothing difficult about it—I promise you confidently that right soon you will turn out an excellent speaker, just like myself. And there is no need for me to tell you what will follow—all the blessings that will instantly accrue to you from Rhetoric. You see my own case. My father was an insignificant fellow without even a clear title to his freedom, who had been a slave above Xois and Thmuis,[*](Xois and Thmuis were towns in the Nile delta, the one in the Sebennitic nome, the other to the eastward, capital of the Thmuite nome. Lucian may mean simply “up-country in the Delta”; but it is better, I think, to take his words more literally as meaning “up-country in each of those two nomes.” ) and my mother was a seamstress in the slums. For myself, as my personal attractions were considered not wholly contemptible, at first I lived with an ill-conditioned, stingy admirer just for my keep. But then I detected the easi-

ness of this road, galloped over it, and reached the summit; for I possessed (by thy grace, Fortune !) all that equipment which I have already mentioned— recklessness, ignorance, and shamelessness. And now, in the first place, my name is no longer Potheinus,[*](Desiderius, Désiré. ) but I have become a namesake of the sons of Zeus and Leda.[*](Castor and Pollux. This passage is the corner-stone of the argument that Pollux is the person at whom Lucian is hitting. ) Moreover, I went to live with an old woman and for a time got my victuals from her by pretending to love a hag of seventy with only four teeth still left, and those four fastened in with gold! However, on account of my poverty I managed to endure the ordeal, and hunger made even those frigid, graveyard kisses exceedingly sweet to me. Then I very nearly became heir to all her property, if only a plaguy slave had not blabbed that I had bought poison for her.