Although he cautioned all to abstain from intercourse with boys on the ground that it was impious, for his own part this pattern of propriety made a clever arrangement. He commanded the cities in Pontus and Paphlagonia to send choir-boys for three years’ service, to sing hymns to the god in his household; they were required to examine, select, and send the noblest, youngest, and most handsome. These he kept under ward and treated like bought slaves, sleeping with them and affronting them in every way. He made it a rule, too, not to greet anyone over eighteen years with his lips, or to embrace and kiss him; he kissed only the young, extending his hand to the others to be kissed by them. They were called “those within the kiss.”

He duped the simpletons in this way from first to last, ruining women right and left as well as living with favourites. Indeed, it was a great thing that everyone coveted if he simply cast his eyes upon a man’s wife; if, however, he deemed her worthy of a kiss, each husband thought that good fortune would flood his house. Many women even boasted that they had had children by Alexander, and their husbands bore witness that they spoke the truth!

I want to include in my tale a dialogue between Glycon and one Sacerdos, a man of Tius, whose intelligence you will be able to appraise from his questions. I read the conversation in an inscription in letters of gold, at Tius, in the house of Sacerdos. “Tell me, Master Glycon,’ said he, “who are you?” “I am the latter-day Asclepius,’ he replied. “A different person from the one of former times? What do vou mean?” “It is not permitted you to hear that.” “How many years will you tarry among us delivering oracles?” “One thousand and three.” “Then where shall you go?” “To Bactra and that region, for the barbarians too must profit by my presence among men.” ‘What of the other prophetic shrines, the one in Didymi, the one in Clarus, and the one in Delphi—do they still have your father Apollo as the source of their oracles, or are the predictions now given out there false?’”’ “This too you must not wish to know; it is not permitted.” “What about myself—what shall I be after my present life?”’ “A camel, then a horse, then a wise man and prophet just as great as Alexander.” That was Glycon’s conversation with Sacerdos; and in conclusion he uttered an oracle in verse, knowing that Sacerdos was a follower of Lepidus:

See p. 211, note1.

Indeed, he seriously imperilled one of the Epicureans who ventured to expose him in the presence of a great crowd. The man went up to him and said in a loud voice: “Come now, Alexander! You prevailed upon such-and-such a Paphlagonian to put his servants on trial for their lives before the governor of Galatia on the charge that they had murdered his son, a student at Alexandria, But the young man is living, and has come back alive after the execution of the servants, whom you gave over to the wild beasts.” What had happened was this. The young man cruised up the Nile as far as Clysma,

Probably Suez; the ancient canal from the Nile to the Red Sea ended there.

When he told this tale, Alexander, indignant at the exposure and unable to bear the truth of the reproach, told the bystanders to stone him, or else they themselves would be accurst and would bear the name of Epicureans. They had begun to throw stones when a man named Demostratus who happened to be in the city, one of the most prominent men in Pontus,

I suspect that the Greek phrase is really a title, but cannot prove it; the use of πρῶτος without the article seems to make the phrase mean “One of the First Citizens.”