On Salaried Posts in Great Houses (31-35)

While you are still debating these matters the bell rings, and you must follow the same routine, go the rounds and stand up; but first you must rub your loins and knees with ointment if you wish to last the struggle out! Then comes a similar dinner, prolonged to the same hour. In your case the diet is in contrast to your former way of living; the sleeplessness, too, and the sweating and the weariness gradually undermine you, giving rise to consumption, pneumonia, indigestion, or that noble complaint, the gout. You stick it out, however, and often you ought to be abed, but this is not permitted. They think illness a pretext, and a way of shirking your duties. The general consequences are that you are always pale and look as if you were going to die any minute.

So it goes in the city. And if you have to go into the country, I say nothing of anything else, but it often rains; you are the last to get there—even in the matter of horses it was your luck to draw that kind!— and you wait about until for lack of accommodation they crowd you in with the cook or the mistress’s hairdresser without giving you even a generous supply of litter for a bed!

I make no bones of telling you a story that I was told by our friend Thesmopolis, the Stoic, of something that happened to him which was very comical, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the same thing may happen to someone else. He was in the household of a rich and self-indulgent woman who belonged to a distinguished family in the city. Having to go into the country one time, in the first place he underwent, he said, this highly ridiculous experience, that he, a philosopher, was given a favourite to sit by, one of those fellows who have their legs depilated and their beards shaved off; the mistress held him in high honour, no doubt. He gave the fellow’s name; it was Dovey![*]_ Now what a thing that was, to begin with, for a stern‘old man with a grey beard (you know what a long, venerable beard Thesmopolis used to have) to sit beside a fellow with rouged cheeks, underlined eyelids, an unsteady glance, and a skinny neck—no dove, by Zeus, but a plucked vulture! Indeed, had it not been for repeated entreaties, he would have worn a hair-net on his head. In other ways too Thesmopolis suffered numerous annoyances from him all the way, for he hummed and whistled and no doubt would even have danced in the carriage if Thesmopolis had not held him in check.

Then too, something else of a similar nature was required of him. The woman sent for him and said: “Thesmopolis, I am asking a great favour of you;

That is the way they make free with their dependants, yes, make game of them, gradually rendering them submissive to their effrontery. I know a sharp-

All this is not so bad, perhaps. But if Divesf himself has a turn for writing poetry or prose and recites his own compositions at dinner, then you must certainly split yourself applauding and flattering him and excogitating new styles of praise. Some of them wish to be admired for their beauty also, and they must hear themselves called an Adonis or a Hyacinthus, although sometimes they have a yard of nose. If you withhold your praise, off you go at once to the quarries of Dionysius because you are jealous and are plotting against your master. They must be philosophers and rhetoricians, too, and if they happen to commit a solecism, precisely on that account their language must seem full of the flavour of Attica and of Hymettus, and it must be the law to speak that way in future.