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"Where shall I make a beginning,” my friend, “and where make an end of relating”Cf. Odyssey9, 14. all that must be done and suffered by those who take salaried posts and are put on trial in the friendship of our wealthy men—if the name of friendship may be applied to that sort of slavery on their part? Iam familiar with much, I may say most, of their experiences, not because I myself have ever tried anything of that kind, for it never became a necessity for me to try it, and, ye gods! I pray it never may; but many of those who have blundered into this existence have talked to me freely, some, who were still in their misery, bewailing the many bitter sufferings which they were then undergoing, and others, who had broken jail, as it were, recalling not without pleasure those they had undergone; in fact they joyed in recounting what they had escaped from.
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These latter were the more trustworthy because they had gone through all the degrees of the ritual, so to speak, and had been initiated into everything from beginning to end. So it was not without interest and attention that I listened to them while they spun yarns about their shipwreck and unlooked-for deliverance, just like the men with shaven heads who gather in crowds at the temples and tell of third waves, tempests, headlands, strandings, masts carried away, rudders broken, and to cap it all, how the T win Brethren appeared (they are peculiar to this sort of rhodomontade), or how some other deus ex machina sat on the masthead or stood at the helm and steered the ship to a soft beach where she might break up gradually and slowly and they themselves get ashore safely by the grace and favour of the god. Those men, to be sure, invent the greater part of their tragical histories to meet their temporary need, in order that they may receive alms from a greater number of people by seeming not only unfortunate but dear to the gods;
