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“I,” quoth Eudemus, “was summoned as it grew crepuscular by Damasias the quondam athlete and champion, now out of the lists for eld—the brazen image, you know, in the square.Out of compliment to him as a champion, his statue was set up in the square. He was hard at it a-plucking and a-singeing, for he intended to marry off his daughter to-day and was busking her. Then a TermerianWhat a “Termerian misfortune” was, the ancients themselves do not seem to have known, except that it was a great one, and that “Termerian” was derived from a name— according to Suidas, that of a tyrant’s keep in Caria, used as a prison. misadventure befell that cut short the gala day. Distraught over I know not what, or more likely overtaken by divine detestation, his son Dion hung himself, and, depend upon it, he would have been undone if I had not been there to slip the noose and relieve him of his coil. Squatting on my hunkers beside him for a long time, I jobbed him, titillating and sounding him lest perchance his windpipe still hang together. But what helped most was that I confined his extremes with both hands and applied pressure.”Eudemus means to convey the idea that he undid the noose and attempted to relieve the man, but his language is so open to misunderstanding that it suggests quite opposite—that his aim was rather to undo the unhappy subject of his ministrations.
