The Rhetorician’s Vade Mecum (24)

Master these instructions, young man—they are surely simple enough not to overtax your powers—, and I confidently promise that you shall soon be a first-class rhetorician like myself; after which I need not tell you what great and what rapid advancement Rhetoric will put in your way. You have but to look at me. My father was an obscure person barely above a slave; he had in fact been one south of Xois and Thmuis; my mother a common sempstress. I was myself not without pretensions to beauty in my youth, which earned me a bare living from a miserly ill-conditioned admirer; but I discovered this easy short-cut, made my way to the top—for I had, if I may be bold to say it, all the qualifications

I told you of, confidence, ignorance, and effrontery—, and at once found myself ina position to change my name of Pothinus to one that levels me with the children of Zeus and Leda. I thenestablished myself in an old dame’s house, where I earned my keep by professing a passion for her seventy years and her half-dozen remaining teeth, dentist’s gold and all. However, poverty reconciled me to my task; even for those cold coffin kisses, fames was condimentum optimum. And it was by the merest ill luck that I missed inheriting her wealth—that damned slave who peached about the poison I had bought!