and beauty; and [the goddesses], Persuasion and Venus, graced the well-moneyed man. The king of the Cappadocians, rich in slaves, is in want of coin; be not you like him. Lucullus, as they say, being asked if he could lend a hundred cloaks for the stage, “How can I so many?” said he: “yet I will see, and send as many as I have;” a little after he writes that he had five thousand cloaks in his house; they might take part of them, or all. It is a scanty house, where there are not many things superfluous, and which escape the owner’s notice, and are the gain of pilfering slaves. If then wealth alone can make and keep a man happy, be first in beginning this work, be last in leaving it off. If appearances and popularity make a man fortunate, let as purchase a slave to dictate [to us] the names [of the citizens], to jog us on the left-side, and to make us stretch our hand over obstacles: “This man has much interest in the Fabian, that in the Veline tribe; this will give the fasces to any one, and, indefatigably active, snatch the curule ivory from whom he pleases; add [the names of] father, brother: according as the age of each is, so courteously adopt him. If he who feasts well, lives well; it is day, let us go whither our appetite leads us: let us fish, let us hunt, as did some time Gargilius: who ordered his toils, hunting-spears, slaves, early in the morning to pass through the crowded forum and the people: that one mule among many, in the sight of the people, might return loaded with a boar purchased with money. Let us bathe with an indigested and full-swollen stomach, forget-
