23
Ah, scurvy outcast (that would be my language, above all to a self-styled philosopher), if a wrecker or a pirate had taken you at sea and were offering you for sale, would you not pity yourself for being ill-fated beyond your deserts; or if someone had laid hands upon you and were haling you off, saying that you were a slave, would you not invoke the law and make a great stir and be wrathful and shout ‘“Heavens and Earth!” at the top of your voice? Then just for a few obols, at that age when, even if you were a slave by birth, it would be high time for you to look forward at last to liberty, have you gone and sold yourself, virtue and wisdom included? Had you no respect, either, for all those wonderful sermons that your noble Plato and Chrysippus and Aristotle have preached in praise of freedom and in censure of servility? Are you not ashamed to undergo comparison with flatterers and loafers and buffoons; to be the only person in all that Roman throng who wears the incongruous cloak of a scholar and talks Latin with a villainous accent; to take part, moreover, in uproarious dinners, packed with human flotsam that is mostly vile? At these dinners you are vulgar in your compliments, and you drink more than is discreet. Then in the morning, roused by a bell, you shake off the sweetest of your sleep and run about town with the pack, up hill and down dale, with yesterday's mud still on your legs. Were you so in want of lupines and herbs of the field, did even the springs of cold water fail you so completely, as to bring you to this pass out of desperation? No, clearly it was because you did not want water and lupines, but cates and meat and wine with a bouquet that you were caught, hooked like a pike in the very part that hankered for all this—in the gullet—and it served you quite right! You are confronting, therefore, the rewards of this greediness, and with your neck in a collar like a monkey you are a laughing-stock to others, but seem to yourself to be living in luxury because you can eat figs without stint. Liberty and noblesse, with all their kith and kin, have disappeared completely, and not even a memory of them abides.
