14
While she was still speaking thus, and without waiting to hear her to the end, I seemed to spring up and leave the ugly woman in laborer's guise, and cross over to Culture right joyfully, particularly since that stick came into my head, and how the other had caused me a beating only yesterday on my first acquaintance with her. When she was deserted she at first went into a passion, smiting her hands together and grinding her teeth; but finally she grew rigid and turned to stone, as we hear Niobe did. Now even if this experience of her's seems extraordinary, do not disbelieve it, for dreams work wonders.
15
The other woman looked at me and said, "Now I will repay you for the justice of your judgment. Come forthwith and mount this car "-pointing to a car drawn by winged horses resembling Pegasus -"so that you may see what you would have missed knowing if you had not followed me." Thereupon I mounted the car, and she drove; and borne aloft I beheld, from the east to the west, cities and nations and peoples, and I sowed something upon the earth like Triptolemos. However, what it was that I sowed I do not now remember, but only this, that the people looked up at me from beneath and praised me, and sped me on my way wherever I passed in my flight.
16
When she had shown these things to me, and me to these admiring people, she brought me down again, no longer dressed as I was when I flew away, but seeming to myself to arrive like a grandee born to the purple. She came upon my father himself, who was standing by and waiting for me, showed him my clothes and me, in what state I came, and reminded him, too, of the decision they had come near making about me. These are the things that I remember seeing when hardly more than a boy, I think, and still terrified at the thought of a flogging.
