31
Now these requests seem to me to be reasonable. “How,” they say, “can we, shivering in this extreme cold and in the grip of famine, keep festival as well?” So if I wanted them too to share in the festival, they bade me compel you to give them a share of any clothing you have above your needs or any too coarse for you, and to sprinkle on them a little of your gold. If you do that, they say, they will not even argue with you before Zeus any more about your possessions. Otherwise they threaten a summons for redistribution of property just as soon as Zeus begins his cases. These things are not at all difficult for you to grant out of all that you are rightly blessed with.
32
Oh yes, the dinners and their dining with you—they asked me to add this to my letter, that at present you gorge alone behind locked doors, and, if ever at long intervals you are willing to entertain any of them, there is more annoyance than good cheer in the dinner, and most of what happens is done to hurt them—that business of not drinking the same wine as you, for instance—goodness! how ungenerous that is! They themselves might well be condemned for not getting up and going during the proceedings and leaving the banquet entirely to you. But they say that even so they do not drink their fill, for your cup-bearers, like Odysseus’s companions, Homer, Od. xii, 173 ff. have had their ears stuffed with wax. The rest is so disgraceful that I hesitate to mention their complaints of the way the meat is apportioned and how the servants stand beside you until you are full to bursting, but run past them. There are many more like complaints of meanness, complaints that bring little credit to gentlemen. In fact the pleasantest thing, more in keeping with conviviality, is equality, and a controller of the feast presides over your banquets just so that all can have an equal share.
