"Where shall I make a beginning,” my friend, “and where make an end of relating”

Cf. Odyssey9, 14.

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.

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 πόντονῥιπτεῖν καὶ πετρέων, Κύρνε, κατ᾽ ἠλιβάτων.καὶ γὰρ ἀνὴρ πενίῃ δεδμημένος οὔτε τι εἰπεῖνοὐθ᾽ ἕρξαι δύναται, γλῶσσα δέ οἱ δέδεται.Theognis 173 ff.