"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

 
 
upon that life. I detected it first one time when our
conversation turned to that theme, and then someone
of the company praised this kind of wage-earning,
saying that men were thrice happy when, besides
having the noblest of the Romans for their friends,
eating expensive dinners without paying any scot,
living in a handsome establishment, and travelling in
all comfort and luxury, behind a span of white horses,
perhaps, with their noses in the air, That this is the meaning of éurriaCovres, and not “lolling at ease,” is clear from Book-Collector 21 and Downward Journey 16. they could also
get no inconsiderable amount of pay for the friendship
which they enjoyed and the kindly treatment which
they received ; really everything grew without sowing
and ploughing for such as they. When you heard all
that and more of the same nature, I saw how you
gaped at it and held your mouth very wide open for
the bait. 
In order, then, that as far as I am concerned I may
be free from blame in future and you may not be
able to say that when I saw you swallowing up that
great hook along with the bait I did not hold you
back or pull it away before it got into your throat or
give you forewarning, but waited until I saw you
dragged along by it and forcibly haled away when at
last it was pulled and had set itself firmly, and then,
when it was no use, stood and wept—in order that you
may not say this, which would be a very sound plea if
you should say it, and impossible for me to controvert
on the ground that I had done no wrong by not
warning you in advance—listen to everything at the
outset; examine the net itself and the impermeability of the pounds beforehand, from the outside at


 

your leisure, not from the inside after you are in the
fyke ; take in your hands the bend of the hook and
the barb of its point, and the tines of the harpoon ;
puff out your cheek and try them on it, and if they
do not prove very keen and unescapable and painful
in one’s wounds, pulling hard and gripping irresistibly,
then write me down a coward who goes hungry for
that reason, and, exhorting yourself to be bold,
attack your prey if you will, swallowing the bait
whole like a gull!

 

The whole story will be told for your sake, no
doubt, in the main, but it will concern not only
students of philosophy like yourself, and those who
have chosen one of: the more strenuous vocations in
life, but also grammarians, rhetoricians, musicians, and
ina word all who think fit to enter families and serve
for hire as educators. Since the experiences of all
are for the most part common and similar, it is clear
that the treatment accorded the philosophers, so far
from being preferential, is more contumelious for
being the same, if it is thought that what is good
enough for the others is good enough for them, and
they are not handled with any greater respect by
their paymasters. Moreover, the blame for whatever the discussion itself brings out in its advance
ought to be given primarily to the men themselves
who do such things and secondarily to those who put
up with them. I am not to blame, unless there is
something censurable in truth and frankness. 
As to those who make up the rest of the mob, such
as athletic instructors and parasites, ignorant, pettyminded, naturally abject fellows, it is not worth while
to try to turn them away from such household positions, for they would not heed, nor indeed is it proper
to blame them for not leaving their paymasters,


 

however much they may be insulted by them, for
they are adapted to this kind of occupation and not
too good for it. Besides, they would not have anything else to which they might turn in order to keep
themselves busy, but if they should be deprived ot
this, they would be without a trade at once and out
of work and superfluous. So they themselves cannot
suffer any wrong nor their employers be thought
insulting for using a pot, as the saying goes, for a
pot’s use. They enter households in the first instance
to encounter this insolence, and it is their trade to
bear and tolerate it. But in the case of the educated
men whom I mentioned before, it is worth while to
be indignant and to put forth every effort to bring
them back and redeem them to freedom.
 
It seems to me that I should do well to examine in
advance the motives for which some men go into
this sort of life and show that they are not at all
urgent or necessary. In that way their defence and
the primary object of their voluntary slavery would
be done away with in advance. Most of them plead
their poverty and their lack of necessities, and think
that in this way they have set up an adequate screen
for their desertion to this life. They consider that it
quite suffices them if they say that they act pardonably in seeking to escape poverty, the bitterest thing
in life. Then Theognis comes to hand, and time and
again we hear :
“All men held in subjection to Poverty,” ἄνδρ᾽ ἀγαθὸν πενίη πάντων δάμνησι μάλιστα, καὶ γήρως πολιοῦ, Κύρνε, καὶ ἠπιάλου, ἣν δὴ χρὴ φεύγοντα καὶ ἐς βαθυκήτεα πόντον ῥιπτεῖν καὶ πετρέων, Κύρνε, κατ᾽ ἠλιβάτων. καὶ γὰρ ἀνὴρ πενίῃ δεδμημένος οὔτε τι εἰπεῖν οὐθ᾽ ἕρξαι δύναται, γλῶσσα δέ οἱ δέδεται. Theognis 173 ff. 


 

and all the other alarming statements about poverty
that the most spiritless of the poets have put forth. 
If I saw that they truly found any refuge from
poverty in such household positions, I should not
quibble with them in behalf of excessive liberty ; but
when they receive what resembles “the diet of invalids,” as our splendid orator once said, Demosthenes3, 33. how can one
avoid thinking that even in this particular they are ill
advised, inasmuch as their condition in life always
remains the same? They are always poor, they must
continue to receive, there is nothing put by, no
surplus to save: on the contrary, what is given, even
if it is given, even if payment is received in full, is all
spent to the last copper and without satisfying their
need. It would have been better not to excogitate
any such measures, which keep poverty going by
simply giving first aid against it, but such as will do
away with it altogether—yes, and to that end perhaps
even .to plunge into the deep-bosomed sea if one
must, Theognis, and down precipitous cliffs, as you ~
say. But if a man who is always poor and needy
and on an allowance thinks that thereby he has
escaped poverty, I do not know how one can avoid
thinking that such a man deludes himself.