A Professor of Public Speaking (24)

“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,[*] 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,[*] but I have become a namesake of the sons of Zeus and Leda.[*] 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.