38
As to your pay itself, it is a matter of two obols, or four, at a time, and when you ask for it you are a bore and a nuisance. So, in order to get it you must flatter and wheedle the master and pay court to his steward too, but in another way; and you must not neglect his friend and adviser, either. As what you get is already owing to a clothier or doctor or shoemaker, his gifts are no gifts and profit you nothing.An allusion to Sophocles, Ajax665: ἐχθρῶν ἄδωρα δῶρα κοὺκ ὀνήσιμα.
39
You are greatly envied, however, and perhaps some slanderous story or other gradually gets afoot by stealth and comes to a man who by now is glad to receive charges against you, for he sees that you are used up by your unbroken exertions and pay lame and exhausted court to him, and that the gout is growing upon you. To sum it up, after garnering all that was most profitable in you, after consuming the most fruitful years of your life and the greatest vigour of your body, after reducing you to a thing of _ rags and tatters, he is looking about for a rubbish-heap on which to cast you aside unceremoniously, and for another man to engage who can stand the work. Under the charge that you once made overtures to a page of his, or that, in spite of your age, you are trying to seduce an innocent girl, his wife's maid, or something else of that sort, you leave at night, hiding your face, bundled out neck and crop, destitute of everything and at the end of your tether, taking with you, in addition to the burden of your years, that excellent companion, gout. What you formerly knew you have forgotten in all these years, and you have made your belly bigger than a sack, an insatiable, inexorable curse. Your gullet, too, demands what it is used to, and dislikes to unlearn its lessons.
