“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.