Dialogues of the Dead (17.2)

When we’d come in after our bath, the lad had two cups ready, one with the poison for Ptoeodorus, and the other for me, but somehow he made a mistake, giving me the poison, and Ptoeodorus the harmless cup. A moment later, while he was still drinking, I was lying my full length on the floor, and the wrong man was dead. Why do you find it amusing, Zenophantus? You oughtn’t to laugh at a friend.

Well, it was a droll thing to happen. But what did the old man do?

At first he was a little put out by the suddenness of it all, but then he understood what had happened, I suppose, and laughed himself to see what his butler had done.

But you oughtn’t to have taken that short cut; you’d have been surer of getting him here by the highway, even if he was a little slow in coming.