5
TYCHIADES You are quite right in what you say. For example, I come to you from Eucrates the magnificent, having listened to a great lot of incredible yarns; to put it more accurately, I took myself off in the midst of the conversation because I could not stand the exaggeration of the thing: they drove me out as if they had been the Furies by telling quantities of extraordinary miracles.
5
PHILOCLES But, Tychiades, Eucrates is a trustworthy person, and nobody could ever believe that he, with such a long beard, a man of sixty, and a great devotee of philosophy too, would abide even to hear someone else tell a lie in his presence, let alone venturing to do anything of that sort himself.
5
TYCHIADES Why, my dear fellow, you do not know what sort of statements he made, and how he confirmed them, and how he actually swore to most of them, taking oath upon his children, so that as I gazed at him all sorts of ideas came into my head, now that he was insane and out of his right mind, now that he was only a fraud, after all, and I had failed, in all these years, to notice that his lion’s skin covered a silly ape; so extravagant were the stories that he told.
5
PHILOCLES What were they, Tychiades, in the name of Hestia?The oath amounts to “In the name of friendship.” I should like to know what sort of quackery he has been screening behind that great beard.
6
TYCHIADES I used to visit. him previously, Philocles, whenever I had a good deal of leisure; and to-day, when I wanted to find Leontichus, a close friend of mine, as you know, and was told by his boy that he had gone off to the house of Eucrates in the early morning to pay him a call because he was ill, I went there for two reasons, both to find Leontichus and to see Eucrates, for I had not known that he was ill.
