35
That is the way they make free with their dependants, yes, make game of them, gradually rendering them submissive to their effrontery. I know a sharp- tongued rhetorician who made a speech by request at dinner in a style that was not by any means uncultivated, but very finished and studied. He was applauded, however, because his speech, which was delivered while they were drinking, was timed by flasks of wine instead of measures of water! And he took this venture on, it was said, for two hundred drachmas.It was not the fashion at ancient banquets for guests to make speeches. In consenting to deliver a selection from his repertory, the rhetorician put himself on a par with a professional entertainer. This was bad enough, but he made things still worse by allowing the company to time his speech with a substitute for a water-clock which they improvised out of a flask of wine.
35
All this is not so bad, perhaps. But if Divesf himself has a turn for writing poetry or prose and recites his own compositions at dinner, then you must certainly split yourself applauding and flattering him and excogitating new styles of praise. Some of them wish to be admired for their beauty also, and they must hear themselves called an Adonis or a Hyacinthus, although sometimes they have a yard of nose. If you withhold your praise, off you go at once to the quarries of Dionysius because you are jealous and are plotting against your master. They must be philosophers and rhetoricians, too, and if they happen to commit a solecism, precisely on that account their language must seem full of the flavour of Attica and of Hymettus, and it must be the law to speak that way in future.
