Apologia

1. For my part I was certain, and held it for a settled truth, Maximus Claudianus, and you who sit with him in council, that Sicinius Aemilianus — an old man of notorious recklessness — having begun his accusation of me before you sooner than he had thought it through in his own mind, would, for want of any real charges, fill it out with abuse alone; for any innocent man can be accused, but none save the guilty can be convicted. Relying on this one point above all, I give thanks, so help me, that the opportunity and means have fallen to me, with you for judge, of clearing philosophy in the eyes of the ignorant and of vindicating myself; though these slanders, weighty as they seem at first sight, were for all that sudden enough to make the defence difficult. For, as you remember, it is now the fifth or sixth day since I had set about pleading the cause of my wife Pudentilla against the Granii, when, by prearrangement and to my surprise, her opponents' advocates began to assail me with abuse and to accuse me of magical sorcery, and at last of the murder of my stepson Pontianus. And when I perceived that these were not so much charges brought before a court as taunts thrown out in a quarrel, I myself, by repeated demands, challenged them to bring an accusation. At that point Aemilianus, seeing that you too were rather strongly moved and that the affair had passed from words into earnest, began out of his own diffidence to look for some hiding-place for his rashness.

2. And so Pontianus, his own brother's son, whom a little before he had loudly proclaimed I had murdered — the moment he is pressed to put his name to the indictment, he forgot all about him; he fell suddenly silent about the death of his young kinsman. Yet, that he might not appear to be giving up the description of so great a crime altogether, he chose out for his accusation that one charge alone, the charge of magic, which is more easily defamed than proved. And not even that does he dare to do openly; instead, on the next day he lodges a written charge in the name of my stepson Sicinius Pudens, a mere boy, and adds that he is acting as his support — a novel manner of attacking a man through another — so that, under cover of the boy's tender years, he himself might escape punishment for a false accusation. And when you, most shrewdly, had noticed this, and on that account had ordered him once more to sustain in his own name the accusation he had laid, he promised he would do so; yet not even thus could he be brought to plead at close quarters, but, in defiance even of you, he keeps skirmishing obstinately from a distance with his slanders. So, as often as he fled from the danger of accusing, he persisted in the indulgence granted to a mere assistant. And so, even before the case came to be tried, it was easy for anyone to understand what sort of accusation this was likely to be, when the very man who had been its author and contriver was afraid to become its sponsor — and Sicinius Aemilianus especially, who, had he discovered anything true against me, would surely never have so hesitatingly arraigned on so many and so great charges a man who was a stranger to him; the same man who branded his own uncle's will, which he knew to be genuine, as a forgery, and with such persistence that, when Lollius Urbicus, a man of consular rank, had pronounced, on the advice of men of consular standing, that it ought to be held genuine and valid, this utter madman, in the face of that most authoritative verdict, swore that the will was nevertheless a fabrication — so that Lollius Urbicus could scarcely keep from his destruction.

3. And that verdict, relying upon your fairness and my innocence, I trust will burst forth in this trial too; for a man who knowingly accuses an innocent person does so all the more easily because, as I have said, he has already been convicted of lying before the prefect of the city in a most important case. For just as every good man, once he has erred, afterwards guards against it the more anxiously, so the man of evil nature repeats his fault the more boldly, and thereafter, the oftener he offends, the more openly he offends. For shame, like a garment, is treated with the more carelessness the more worn it is. And therefore I think it necessary, for the sake of my own untarnished sense of shame, before I come to the substance of the case, to refute all these slanders. For I am undertaking the defence not of myself only, but of philosophy as well, whose greatness scorns even the slightest reproach as if it were the gravest crime — on which account, a little while ago, Aemilianus' advocates blurted out, with their hireling loquacity, many things specially invented against me, and others commonly leveled by the ignorant against philosophers in general. And although these things, babbled by such men for hire and paid out as wages of impudence, might be passed over — there being a certain license granted by custom to pettifoggers of this kind, who are wont to let out the venom of their tongues for another man's hurt — still, even for my own sake, they must be refuted in a few words, lest I, who labour diligently to admit no stain or dishonour upon myself, should seem to anyone, if I were to pass over even some trifle, to have acknowledged it rather than despised it. For it belongs to a modest and self-respecting mind, in my opinion, to be pained even by false reproaches, since even those who are conscious of some fault are nonetheless greatly disturbed and angered when they are ill spoken of, although, from the time they began to do wrong, they have grown used to being ill spoken of; for, even if others say nothing, they are themselves aware that they might justly be reproached. But the good and blameless man, having ears untrained and unused to ill report, and being unaccustomed to insult through his habit of praise, labours all the more grievously in spirit when things are said of him undeservedly which he himself could truly fling back at others. But if perchance I shall seem to be willing to defend things foolish and utterly trifling, that must be charged as a fault to those for whom it is shameful even to have brought such charges, and not laid to my account, for whom it will be honourable even to have refuted them.

4. You heard, then, a little while ago, at the very opening of the accusation, the words spoken thus: "We accuse before you a philosopher who is handsome and — oh, the scandal! — most eloquent both in Greek and in Latin." For, unless I am mistaken, it was with these very words that Tannonius Pudens, a man assuredly not the most eloquent, opened his accusation of me. And would that he had reproached me truly with such grave crimes as beauty and eloquence! It would have been no hard matter to answer him as the Homeric Alexander answered Hector:

"The gods' renowned gifts are not to be cast away, all that they themselves bestow — though no man would take them of his own will,"

that the most glorious gifts of the gods are by no means to be scorned; gifts which nevertheless, though the gods are wont to grant them, do not fall to the lot of many who desire them. This I should have answered concerning beauty. Besides, I should have said that even philosophers are permitted to be of comely appearance: that Pythagoras, who was the first to call himself a philosopher, was the handsomest man of his age; likewise that ancient Zeno, the man of Elea, who was the first of all to resolve ambiguities in twofold fashion by a most ingenious method — that he too, this Zeno, was of striking beauty, as Plato declares; and likewise that many philosophers are recorded to have been most comely of face, who adorned the grace of their bodies with the ornaments of their characters. But this defence, as I have said, is somewhat remote from me, for, apart from my middling looks, the unbroken toil of literary labour wipes away from my body all grace, thins my frame, drains its juices, blots out its colour, and weakens its vigour. My very hair, which these men with open falsehood declared I had let grow long as an allurement to good looks — you see how charming and dainty it is, matted and tangled with neglect, like a tuft of tow, unevenly shaggy and clotted and knotted, utterly past disentangling through long carelessness not only of dressing but even of combing and parting it: enough, I think, to refute the charge of hair, which they pressed as if it were a capital offence.

5. As for eloquence, if I had any, it ought to seem neither marvelous nor invidious that, devoted from my earliest years with all my strength to the single pursuit of letters, having spurned all other pleasures, I should have sought it up to this time of my life with a toil — I scarcely know whether beyond that of all other men — by day and by night, and at the cost and expense of good health. But let them have no fear of my eloquence, which I — if I have made any progress in it at all — rather hope for than make good. To be sure, if it is true, as they say Statius Caecilius wrote in his poems, that innocence is eloquence, then I for my part profess on that principle that I yield to no man alive in eloquence. For who, on this reckoning, would live more eloquent than I, who have never conceived a thought that I would not dare to utter? I declare myself the most fluent of speakers, for I have always counted every wrongdoing an abomination; and the most articulate, because there exists no deed or word of mine about which I could not discourse in public — as indeed I shall now discourse about those verses which they produced as if they were something to be ashamed of, written by me; when, as you observed, I was vexed with them, and could not help laughing, because they declaimed them so harshly and ignorantly.

6. First, then, they read out, from among my lighter pieces, a little letter in verse about tooth-powder, addressed to a certain Calpurnianus; who, when he produced that letter against me, did not see — in his eagerness to do me harm — that if anything in it were made a charge against me, the matter would be one I shared with him. For that he had asked something of me to clean his teeth, the verses themselves bear witness:

Calpurnianus, greetings in these hurried lines. I have sent you, as you asked, a thing to make your teeth shine clean, a polish for the mouth, from the fruits of Arabia, a fine, white, noble little powder, a smoother of the swollen little gum, a sweeper-away of yesterday's leavings, that no foul stain of grime may show if perchance, with parted lips, you should smile.

I ask you, what is there in those verses shameful in matter or in word, what at all that a philosopher might be unwilling to own as his? Unless perhaps I am to be censured for having sent Calpurnianus a powder from the fruits of Arabia — when it would have been far more fitting that, after the filthy fashion of the Iberians, as Catullus says, he should scrub his teeth and his red gums with his own urine.

7. I saw just now some men scarcely able to hold back their laughter, when that orator there censured cleanliness of the mouth so harshly, and pronounced the word "tooth-powder" with as much indignation as no one ever pronounced "poison." And why not? It is a charge by no means to be despised in a philosopher, that he allows nothing about himself to be unclean, suffers no part of his exposed body to be filthy and foul-smelling — and the mouth above all, of which a man makes use most frequently and in full view of all, whether he gives someone a kiss, or converses with anyone, or holds forth in a lecture-hall, or offers up prayers in a temple: for speech precedes every act of man, and speech, as the foremost poet says, sets out from the barrier of the teeth. Suppose you produced now some equally grand-sounding speaker: he would say, in his own manner, that for one who has any care at all for fine speaking, the mouth above all the rest of the body must be tended, since it is the vestibule of the mind, the gateway of speech, and the assembly-place of one's thoughts. For my own part, I would say, after my own measure, that nothing less befits a free-born and gentlemanly man than uncleanness of the mouth. For it is a part of man set in a lofty place, ready to the sight, eloquent in use; whereas in wild beasts and cattle the mouth is set low and cast down toward the feet, close to the track and to the fodder, and is scarcely ever seen except in the dead or in creatures roused to bite: but of a man, there is nothing you would gaze upon sooner when he is silent, nothing more often when he speaks.

8. I should be glad, then, if my censor Aemilianus would answer whether he himself is ever in the habit of washing his feet; or, if he does not deny it, let him maintain that greater care for cleanliness is to be bestowed upon the feet than upon the teeth. Plainly, indeed, if anyone is, like you, Aemilianus, scarcely ever to open his mouth except for abuse and slander, I would advise him to take no care to clean his mouth and not to scour his teeth with foreign powder — teeth which he would more justly grind with charcoal from a funeral pyre — nor even to rinse them with common water: nay, let his guilty tongue, that purveyor of lies and bitterness, lie forever in its own filth and stench. For what reason, in the name of evil, is there to keep a tongue clean and bright while one's speech is foul and loathsome, to breathe black venom from a snow-white little tooth after the manner of a viper? But the man who knows he is about to deliver speech that is neither useless nor unpleasant, rightly washes his mouth beforehand, as a cup is rinsed for good drink. And why do I speak longer of one born a man? That huge beast, the crocodile that is bred in the Nile, even he, as I learn, offers his teeth to be cleaned by an innocent gaping of the jaws. For, having a wide mouth but no tongue, and mostly opened under water, many leeches fasten themselves to his teeth; and when he has come out onto the river-banks and gapes, one of the river-birds, a friendly bird, picks them out by thrusting in its beak, without any danger of harm.

9. I pass over these matters. I come to the other verses which they call amatory, which nevertheless they read so harshly and clumsily as to stir up disgust. But what have magical sorceries to do with the fact that I praised in a poem the boys of my friend Scribonius Laetus? Or am I a magician because I am a poet? Who ever heard tell of a suspicion so plausible, a conjecture so apt, an argument so close to the point? "Apuleius made verses." If they were bad, that is a fault — yet not of a philosopher, but of a poet; if good, what do you accuse? "But he made playful and amatory verses." Are these then my crimes, and have you mistaken the name in indicting me for magic? Yet others too have made such things, even if you are ignorant of it: among the Greeks, a certain man of Teos, and one of Sparta, and one of Ceos, with countless others, and even a Lesbian woman — wantonly indeed, but with such grace that she commends to us the strangeness of her dialect by the sweetness of her songs; and among us Aedituus and Porcius and Catulus, these too with countless others. "But they were not philosophers." Will you then deny that Solon also was a serious man and a philosopher, whose is that most wanton verse: "Longing for thighs and a sweet mouth"? And what is there so wanton in all my verses, if they be matched against that one alone? — to say nothing of the writings of Diogenes the Cynic and of Zeno, founder of the Stoic school, and many more of the kind. Let me recite mine again, that they may know I am not ashamed of them:

And Critias is my delight, and you, Charinus, my well-being, a part in my love remains for you, my life; fear nothing; for though fire and fire scorch me as it will, these two flames, so I may possess them, I will endure. On this condition may I be to you what each is to himself: this you shall be to me, what the two eyes are.

Let me now recite the others too, which they read last, as if these were the most unrestrained:

Garlands of flowers, my honey, and these songs I give you. Songs I give to you, garlands to your guardian spirit, songs, that this longed-for day, Critias, may be sung, the day that returns to you each fourteenth spring; and the garlands, that your temples may bloom in this glad season, that you may adorn the flower of your youth with flowers. You in return give me your springtime for my springtime flower, that you may outdo my gifts with gifts of your own; for the woven garlands you shall give an embrace of your body, and for the roses, the kisses of your crimson lips. But should you breathe your soul into the reed-pipe, then my songs shall yield, conquered by your sweet-voiced reed.

10. There you have my crime, Maximus, made up, as it were, like that of some disreputable reveller, out of garlands and serenades. Here you noticed that I was also censured for this — that, while the boys are called by other names, I gave them the names Charinus and Critias. On the same principle, then, let them accuse Gaius Catullus for naming Lesbia in place of Clodia, and Ticidas likewise for writing "Perilla" of one whose name was Metella, and Propertius, who says "Cynthia" but conceals Hostia, and Tibullus, because Plania was in his heart but Delia in his verse. For my part, I should censure Gaius Lucilius, iambic poet though he be, because he set the boys Gentius and Macedo by their plain names to public shame in his poem. How much more modest, after all, was the Mantuan poet, who likewise, praising in a bucolic sport the boy of his friend Pollio, and abstaining from real names, calls himself Corydon and the boy Alexis. But Aemilianus — a man more rustic than the swineherds and oxherds of Virgil, always boorish and a barbarian, yet far more austere, as he thinks, than the Serrani and Curii and Fabricii — denies that verses of this kind befit a Platonic philosopher. Even so, Aemilianus, if I show they were made after the example of Plato himself? Of whom no verses survive except love-elegies; for all the rest — because, I suppose, they were not so charming — he burned in the fire. Learn, then, the verses of Plato the philosopher to the boy Aster, if at your age you can still learn letters:

Aster, once you shone among the living as the Morning Star; now, dead, you shine as the Evening Star among the departed.

Likewise the same Plato's, on the boys Alexis and Phaedrus, in a single poem:

Now, when Alexis is no more than this — that one said only he was fair — he is gazed at, and on every side by all is admired. My heart, why point out the bone to the dogs? You will suffer for it afterward. Was it not thus we lost Phaedrus?

That I may not call to mind more, I shall make an end if I quote his last verse, on Dion of Syracuse: "O Dion, you who maddened my heart with love.

11. But am I the foolish one, who bring up even these matters in a court of law? Or are you rather the slanderers, who bring even these into an accusation, as if any token of a man's character lay in playing with verses? Have you not read Catullus thus answering the ill-disposed?

For it is fitting that the dutiful poet himself be chaste, but for his little verses there is no such need.

The deified Hadrian, when he honoured with verses the tomb of his friend, the poet Voconius, wrote thus: "Wanton in your verse, but in your mind chaste" — which he would never have said, if charming poems were to be held proof of unchastity. I remember reading too many pieces of this kind by the deified Hadrian himself. Dare to say, if you will, Aemilianus, that what an emperor and censor, the deified Hadrian, did, and left on record as having done, was wrongly done. But do you suppose that Maximus will find fault with anything which he knows was done by me after the example of Plato? Whose verses, which I have just reviewed, are the more pure the more open they are, the more chastely composed the more frankly avowed; for to dissemble and conceal such things, and all of the kind, belongs to the sinner, but to profess and proclaim them belongs to one at play; since Nature has assigned a voice to innocence, but silence to wrongdoing.

12. I forbear, indeed, to mention those lofty and divine doctrines of Plato, unknown to all but the rarest of the pious and unrecognized by all the profane: that there are twin goddesses named Venus, each strong with her own love and her own kind of lovers; one of them common, who, stirred by a vulgar love, lords it with immoderate and savage force over the appetite not only of human souls but even of beasts and wild creatures, binding fast in her embrace the enslaved bodies of the creatures she has struck down; but the other a heavenly Venus, endowed with the noblest love, who cares only for men, and few of those, urging her followers on with no goads or enticements toward what is base; since her love is not pleasant and wanton, but on the contrary unadorned and serious, and reconciles to her lovers, through the beauty of moral excellence, the virtues; and whenever she commends comely bodies, she keeps them far from any insult. For there is nothing else to be cherished in bodily beauty save that it puts the divine soul in mind of that beauty which it once saw, true and unalloyed, among the gods. Wherefore, as Afranius elegantly leaves it written: "The wise man will love, the rest will merely lust" — yet, if you would have the truth, Aemilianus, or if you can ever understand this, the wise man does not so much love as remember.

13. Grant, then, your pardon to Plato the philosopher for his verses on love, lest I be obliged, against the maxim of Ennius' Neoptolemus, to play the philosopher at greater length; or, if you will not do that, I for my part will readily allow myself to be censured for verses of this kind in Plato's company. To you, however, Maximus, I owe ready thanks, that you give such attentive hearing even to these appendices to my defence, necessary because they are set off against the accusation. And therefore I ask this also — that what remains for me to say before the actual charges themselves you would hear, as you have hitherto done, willingly and carefully.

For there follows that long and censorial harangue about the mirror, over which, as if it were some horror of horrors, Pudens nearly burst himself, shouting: "The philosopher owns a mirror! The philosopher possesses a mirror!" Well, suppose I grant that I do possess one — lest you should think you have proved some charge if I were to deny it — yet it does not follow from that that I must also be in the habit of adorning myself before a mirror. For what of it? If I possessed the apparatus of the stage, would you on that ground argue that I am also accustomed to wear the trailing robe of tragedy, the saffron gown of the actor, †... the patchwork cloak of the mime? I think not. For, on the contrary, there are very many things of which I lack the possession yet enjoy the use. But if neither having a thing is proof of using it, nor not having it of not using it, and if it is not so much the possession of the mirror that is blamed as the looking into it, then you must also show this — when, and in whose presence, I looked into a mirror; since, the matter standing as it does, you reckon it more an abomination for a philosopher to see a mirror than for the uninitiated to see the sacred basket of Ceres.

14. Come now, even if I admit that I have looked into one — what crime, after all, is it to know one's own likeness, and to carry it about, not stored up in one place, but ready at hand wherever you please in a little mirror? Or are you unaware that there is nothing more worth looking at to a man than his own form? Indeed I know that of one's sons those are the dearer who are seen to resemble us, and that a public statue of himself is granted to each man, as a reward according to his deserts, that he may behold it. Or what is the meaning of statues and images shaped by the various arts? Unless, perhaps, what has been wrought by art is held praiseworthy, but what nature offers is to be judged blameworthy — when in nature there is even more to marvel at, both the readiness and the likeness. For in all images made by hand, long labour is taken, and yet the likeness does not come out equal to that in mirrors; for clay lacks vigour, stone lacks colour, painting lacks solidity, and all of them lack motion — that which, with peculiar fidelity, reproduces the likeness, since in a mirror the image is seen marvelously rendered, and, being like, is also mobile, and obedient to every nod of the man it belongs to; the same image is always of an age with those who look upon it, from earliest boyhood to the approach of old age, it puts on all the changes of age, shares in so many different states of the body, mimics so many expressions of the same face, whether glad or grieving. But whatever has been moulded of clay, or cast in bronze, or struck in stone, or fixed in wax, or smeared on in pigment, or counterfeited by any other human art, after no long interval of time is rendered unlike, and like a corpse possesses one single, unmoving expression. So far does the polished workmanship of the mirror and its craftsman-like brightness surpass the arts of imagery in rendering a likeness.

15. Either, then, we must follow the maxim of Agesilaus the Spartan alone, who, distrusting his own looks, would never allow himself to be either painted or sculpted; or, if the practice of all other men seems to be retained, in not rejecting statues and images, why should you think that a man's likeness ought rather to be looked upon in stone than in silver, in a panel rather than in a mirror? Or do you reckon it disgraceful to examine one's own form by constant inspection? Was not Socrates the philosopher reported even to have urged this upon his disciples of his own accord — that they should often contemplate themselves in a mirror, so that whichever of them was pleased with his own beauty should take the greater pains not to disgrace the dignity of his body by evil conduct, while whoever thought himself less commendable in form should diligently make it his business to cover his unsightliness with the praise of virtue? So far did the wisest of all men use even a mirror for the schooling of character. And Demosthenes, the foremost master of speaking — who does not know that he always rehearsed his cases before a mirror as before a teacher? So that, when that supreme orator had drawn his eloquence from Plato the philosopher, and had learned his methods of argument from Eubulides the dialectician, he sought from the mirror the final harmony of his delivery. Which, then, do you think has the greater need of care for grace in maintaining his discourse — the rhetorician at his wrangling or the philosopher at his admonishing, the man disputing for a little while before judges drawn by lot or the man forever holding discourse before all mankind, the man at law about the boundaries of fields or the man teaching about the limits of good and evil? And further — it is not only for these reasons that a philosopher ought to look into a mirror; for he must often consider not only his own likeness, but also the very principle of that likeness: whether, as Epicurus holds, images set forth from us, like certain husks streaming in continual flux from our bodies, when they strike upon something smooth and solid, are dashed back and pressed out backwards and answer in reverse; or whether, as other philosophers argue, our rays — whether liquefied in the middle of the eyes and mingled with the outer light and so united, as Plato thinks, or set forth from the eyes alone without any external support, as Archytas holds, or driven by the tension of the air, as the Stoics reckon — when they fall upon some body dense and bright and smooth, rebound at angles equal to those at which they fell, back to their own face, and so what they touch and see outside, they image within the mirror.

16. Does it not seem to you that philosophy ought to investigate and inquire into all these things, and to examine every mirror, whether wet or dry, set to the sun? For which, besides the things I have mentioned, this reasoning too is needed: why in flat mirrors the gaze and the images appear of about equal size, but in convex and globular ones everything is diminished, while on the contrary in concave ones everything is enlarged; where and why left is exchanged with right; when the image in the same mirror now hides itself deep within, now thrusts itself outward; why concave mirrors, if held facing the sun, kindle tinder placed before them; how it comes about that rainbows are seen in the clouds in varied colours, and two suns in rival likeness — and besides these, very many other things of the same kind, which Archimedes of Syracuse treats in a vast volume, a man wonderful before all others for his subtlety in every branch of geometry, but, I rather think, for this above all to be remembered, that he had inspected the mirror often and carefully. If you knew that book, Aemilianus, and had given yourself not only to the field and the clods, but also to the reckoning-board and its dust, then — believe me — although your most hideous face differs little from that of the tragic Thyestes, yet you would surely, out of a desire to learn, look into a mirror, and would one day, leaving the plough, marvel at how many furrows of wrinkles are in your face.

But for my part I should not wonder if you take it well that I speak of that twisted face of yours, but keep silence about your character, which is far more savage. There it is: besides the fact that I am not given to quarrelling, I was also, until quite lately, glad enough to be ignorant whether you were fair or dark, and even now, by Hercules, I hardly know. This came about because you are obscure in your country pursuits, and I am occupied with study. So both the shadow of your obscurity stood in the way of anyone observing you, and I never cared to learn anyone's misdeeds, but always thought it better to cover my own faults than to hunt out other men's. And so this has befallen me with regard to you, which befalls a man who happens to stand in a place flooded with light while another watches him out of the dark. For in just the same way you indeed easily judge, out of your darkness, what I do in the open and in the public eye, while you yourself, in your lowliness...

17. ...hidden away and shunning the light, are not in turn visible to me. As for me, whether you have slaves to till your land, or whether you yourself exchange neighbourly labour with your neighbours, I neither know nor care. But you know that I freed three slaves at Oea on the same day, and your advocate threw this in my face among the other things laid before him by you — though a little earlier he had said that I came to Oea attended by a single slave. Now I should like you to answer me this: how could I have freed three out of one — unless this too is magic? Am I to call it the blindness of lying, or the habit of it? "Apuleius came to Oea with one slave"; then, a few words chattered in between: "Apuleius freed three slaves at Oea in one day." It would not even have been credible that, having come with three, I freed them all; yet if I had done so, why should you reckon three slaves a sign of poverty rather than three freedmen a sign of wealth? You know not at all, Aemilianus, you know not how to accuse a philosopher, you who reproach me with the fewness of my household, which I ought, for glory's sake, to have falsely exaggerated — since I knew that not only philosophers, whose follower I profess myself, but even the emperors of the Roman people gloried in the fewness of their slaves. Have your advocates then not read even these things: that Marcus Antonius, a man of consular rank, kept only eight slaves at home, and Carbo — the one who seized supreme power — one fewer; but that Manius Curius, far renowned for so many crowns of honour, who led his triumph thrice through a single gate, that this Manius Curius had only two camp-servants in the field? So that man, who triumphed over the Sabines and the Samnites and over Pyrrhus, had fewer slaves than triumphs. And Marcus Cato, not waiting for others to proclaim it of him, himself left it written in his own speech that, when he set out as consul for Spain, he took only three slaves from the city; and that, since he had come to the state-villa, and these seemed too few for his use, he ordered two boys to be bought in the forum from the slave-block, and took these five into Spain. Had Pudens read this, in my opinion, he would either have refrained altogether from this abuse, or would have preferred to censure, in the matter of three slaves, the multitude of a philosopher's attendants rather than their fewness.

18. The same man also reproached me with poverty — a charge welcome to a philosopher and to be professed unbidden. For poverty has long been the handmaid of philosophy: frugal, sober, strong with little, a rival of praise, possessed in defiance of riches, secure in her bearing, simple in her dress, sound in counsel; she has never puffed any man up with pride, never depraved any with lawlessness, never made any savage with tyranny; she neither wishes nor is able to have any delights of the belly or the loins. For these and other shameful things are the wonted nurslings of riches; if you should reckon up all the greatest crimes from the whole memory of mankind, you will find no poor man among them, just as, on the contrary, it is no idle thing that the rich figure but rarely among illustrious men; but whomever we admire for any merit, poverty nursed him from the cradle. Poverty, I say, in ancient ages the founder of all states, the discoverer of all arts, guiltless of all sins, bountiful of all glory, crowned with every praise among all nations. For the same poverty, among the Greeks, was just in Aristides, kind in Phocion, vigorous in Epaminondas, wise in Socrates, eloquent in Homer. The same poverty also founded the empire of the Roman people from its beginning, and for that empire she sacrifices to this day to the immortal gods with a ladle and an earthen dish. But if there sat as judges in this case Gaius Fabricius, Gnaeus Scipio, Manius Curius, whose daughters, because of poverty, went to their husbands with dowries given from the public purse, carrying with them their domestic glory and the public money — if Publicola, the expeller of kings, and Agrippa, the reconciler of the people, whose funerals, because of their slender means, were furnished by the Roman people from a collection of small coins — if Atilius Regulus, whose little farm, on account of the like want, was tilled at public expense — if, in short, all those ancient lines of consular and censorial and triumphal rank were sent back for a brief enjoyment of the light to this trial, and could hear it — would you dare to reproach a philosopher with poverty...

19. ...before so many poor consuls? Or does Claudius Maximus seem to you a fit audience for mocking poverty, because he himself has obtained a rich and ample estate? You are mistaken, Aemilianus, and you are far astray as to this man's mind, if you measure him by Fortune's indulgence rather than by philosophy's standard — if you do not think that a man of so austere a school and of such long service is more a friend to a curbed moderation than to a luxurious abundance, and approves of Fortune as one approves a tunic, rather neat than long; for that too, if it is not worn close but trails, hinders and trips a man up no less than a dangling fold. Indeed, in all the things we use for the duties of life, whatever exceeds a fitting moderation runs to excess for a burden rather than a use. And so immoderate riches too, like huge and oversized rudders, sink rather than steer, because they have a vain abundance and a harmful excess. Nay, even among the wealthier sort, I see those especially praised who live with no noise, with modest style, with their means concealed, and who manage great riches without ostentation, without pride, under the appearance of a moderate fortune, like poor men. But if even the rich seek some image and colour of poverty as proof of their modesty, why should the poorer man be ashamed of that which we exercise not in pretence but in truth?

20. I can indeed raise with you a dispute even about the very word: that none of us is poor who is unwilling to have the superfluous, and is able to have the necessary, which by nature are exceedingly few. For he will have the most who desires the least; for he will have as much as he wishes who wishes for the least. And therefore riches are not better reckoned in estates and in lending at interest than in the very mind of a man, which, if it is needy through avarice and insatiable for every gain, will not be satisfied even by mountains of gold, but will always beg for something to increase what it has already gotten. And this is the true confession of poverty; for all desire of acquiring comes from a belief in want, and it does not matter how great that may be which you lack. Philus did not have so large an estate as Laelius, nor Laelius so large as Scipio, nor Scipio so large as Crassus the Rich — and yet not even Crassus the Rich had so large as he wished; so that, while he surpassed all men, he was surpassed by his own avarice, and seemed rich to everyone else rather than to himself. But on the contrary, those philosophers whom I have mentioned, wishing for nothing beyond what they could have, but with their desires and their means in agreement, were rightly and deservedly rich and happy. For you become poor through the want of craving, rich through the contentment of not needing; since the one is discerned by want from desire, the other by disdain from abundance. Therefore, Aemilianus, if you wish me to be reckoned poor, you must first prove me avaricious. But if nothing is wanting in my mind, I care not how much is wanting in external things, in which neither praise lies in abundance nor blame in want.

21. But suppose these things were otherwise, and that I am poor because Fortune begrudged me riches, and these — as commonly happens — were either diminished by a guardian, or snatched away by an enemy, or not left to me by a father: is this to be cast in a man's teeth, poverty, which is laid as a fault to none of the animals — not to the eagle, not to the bull, not to the lion? If a horse abounds in his own virtues, so that he is a steady carrier and a swift runner, no one reproaches him with poverty of fodder: will you lay it to me as a fault, not the crookedness of some deed or word, but that I live in a slender household, that I have rather few possessions, feed more sparingly, dress more lightly, dine more meagerly? And yet I, on the contrary — however small these things seem to you — I judge them many and even excessive, and I desire to confine myself to fewer, that I may be the more happy the more I am gathered in. For the health of the mind, just like that of the body, is unencumbered, while weakness is full of trailing folds, and it is a sure sign of infirmity to need many things. To live, exactly as to swim, a man is the better the freer he is of his load; for in this storm of human life too, light things likewise serve to keep us up, heavy things to sink us. Indeed I have learned that the gods chiefly excel men in this — that they need nothing for their own use; and therefore he among us who needs the fewest things is the most like to a god.

22. Accordingly I took it kindly when, by way of insult, you said that my whole estate was a wallet and a staff. Would that I were of so great a soul that I required nothing whatever beyond that furniture, but bore worthily that same equipment which Crates sought of his own accord, after casting away his riches! Crates, I say — if you give any credit, Aemilianus — a man rich and noble at home among the chief men of Thebes, for love of this garb which you cast in my teeth, gave his large and ample estate to the people, dismissed many slaves from his service and chose solitude, scorned for a single staff his many fruit-bearing trees, exchanged his most splendid villas for a single wallet, which afterwards, having found out its usefulness, he even praised in a poem, bending to this purpose the Homeric verses by which Homer ennobles the island of Crete. I will quote the beginning, that you may not think I have invented these things for my defence:

"There is a city in the midst of the wine-dark mist..."

— and then the rest, so marvelous that, had you read it, you would have envied me my wallet more than my marriage to Pudentilla. Do you reproach philosophers with the wallet and the staff? Then you would reproach the cavalry with their trappings, and the infantry with their shields, and the standard-bearers with their banners, and finally those who triumph with their white four-horse chariots and the palm-broidered toga. These, indeed, are not the trappings of the Platonic school, but the insignia of the Cynic family. Yet for all that, the wallet and staff are to Diogenes and Antisthenes what the diadem is to kings, the general's cloak to commanders, the cap to pontiffs, the staff to augurs. Diogenes the Cynic, indeed, when contending with Alexander the Great about the true nature of kingship, gloried in his staff in place of a sceptre. And Hercules himself, the unconquered — since these things, like the trappings of beggars, are too sordid in your eyes — Hercules himself, I say, the surveyor of the world, the purger of wild beasts, the tamer of nations, that god, even he, when he traversed the lands, a little before he was taken up into heaven for his virtues, was clothed in no more than a single hide, and attended by no more than a single staff.

23. But if you count these examples as nothing, and have summoned me not to plead a cause but to give an account of my property, then — that you may be ignorant of nothing of my affairs, if indeed you are ignorant — I declare that there was left to me and my brother by my father a little under two million sesterces, and that this has been moderately diminished by me through long travel and prolonged studies and frequent acts of generosity. For I have helped most of my friends, and shown gratitude to very many teachers, and even increased the dowries of some men's daughters; nor indeed should I have hesitated to spend even my whole patrimony, in order to acquire for myself that which is greater — the contempt of patrimony. But you, Aemilianus, and men of your kind, uncultured and boorish, are in truth worth just as much as you have, like a barren and luckless tree, which begets no fruit of itself, and is prized only at the value of the timber in its trunk. And yet, Aemilianus, be sparing hereafter to cast poverty in anyone's teeth — you who, until quite lately, used to plough alone with a single little donkey, over three days against the timely rain, the little farm at Zarath which your father left you as your sole inheritance. For it is not long since the frequent deaths of your kinsmen propped you up with unmerited inheritances — whence, rather than from that most hideous face of yours, you have come by the name of Charon.

24. As for my native country, that it is situated on the very border of Numidia and Gaetulia, you have shown out of my own writings, in which I professed myself — when I was holding a public discourse in the presence of Lollianus Avitus, a man of consular rank — to be half-Numidian and half-Gaetulian; nor do I see what there is for me to be ashamed of in that, any more than there was for Cyrus the Elder, that he was, by mixed descent, half-Mede and half-Persian. For it is not where a man was born, but how he is in his conduct, that should be looked to, nor in what region, but on what principle, he has set about living his life. To the greengrocer and the innkeeper it is rightly granted to commend their cabbage and their wine by the nobility of the soil — Thasian wine, Phliasian cabbage; for those nurslings of the earth are much helped to a better flavour by a fertile region, a rainy sky, a gentle wind, a sunny clime, and a juicy soil. But to a man's mind, immigrating from outside into the lodging of the body, what can be added or taken away, of these things, toward virtue or vice? When have not various natures arisen in all nations, although some seem more conspicuous for folly or for shrewdness? Among the dullest Scythians was born the wise Anacharsis, among the clever Athenians the fool Meletides. And I have not said this because I am ashamed of my country, even though we were still the town of Syphax. Yet when he was conquered, we passed by gift of the Roman people to King Masinissa, and afterward, by a fresh settlement of veteran soldiers, we became a most splendid colony, in which colony I had a father who, as a leading man, held the office of duumvir, having passed through all the honours; and his place in that commonwealth I, from the time I began to share in the senate, maintain — in no way degenerate, I hope — with equal honour and esteem. Why, then, did I bring these things forward? That you, Aemilianus, may be less angry with me hereafter, and rather grant me pardon, if through carelessness I happened not to choose that Attic Zarath of yours, to be born in it.

25. Were you not ashamed to fling such charges, with such assurance, in the hearing of such a man as this — to bring forward at once things trifling and mutually contradictory, and yet to reproach me with both? Or did you not accuse me on opposite grounds? Of the wallet and staff, on the score of austere dignity; of the verses and the mirror, on the score of frivolity; of one slave, as a miser; of three freedmen, as a spendthrift; besides, of Greek eloquence and a barbarian homeland? Why then, after all, do you not rouse yourselves and bethink you that you are speaking before Claudius Maximus — before a man austere and busied with the affairs of the whole province? Why, I say, do you not take away these empty insults? Why do you not show what you alleged — monstrous crimes, and forbidden sorceries, and unspeakable arts? Why is your speech feeble in matter and vigorous only in clamour?

For now I come to the very charge of magic, which, kindled with huge uproar to my discredit, has burnt out — to the disappointment of all — in I know not what old wives' tales. Have you ever seen, Maximus, a flame rise from stubble, with a clear crackle, a broad glare, a swift increase, but, the fuel being slight, a fleeting blaze and no remains? There you have that accusation: begun in quarrelling, swelled with words, void of arguments, destined after your verdict to leave no remains of slander. All of which, for Aemilianus, was aimed at this one point — that I am a magician; and therefore I am minded to ask his most learned advocates what a magician is. For if, as I read in very many authors, "magus" is in the Persian tongue what "priest" is in ours, what crime, after all, is it to be a priest, and to know duly, and understand, and be versed in the laws of ceremonies, the sanctity of sacred rites, the right of religious observances — if indeed magic is that which Plato interprets, when he records with what disciplines the Persians imbue a boy who is being brought up to rule a kingdom? I remember the very words of that divine man, which you, Maximus, may recognize along with me: "And when the boy is twice-seven years old, they hand him over to those whom they call the royal tutors; these are four chosen men of the Persians who have been judged the best in the prime of life — the wisest, the most just, the most temperate, and the most courageous. Of these, the one teaches the magic of Zoroaster the son of Oromazes — and this is the worship of the gods — and he teaches also the duties of a king.

26. Do you hear, you who rashly accuse magic, that it is an art acceptable to the immortal gods, fully skilled in worshipping and venerating them — pious, surely, and knowing things divine, ennobled from of old by its founders Zoroaster and Oromazes, the high-priestess of the heaven-dwellers — seeing that it is taught among the first of royal accomplishments, and that no one among the Persians is rashly allowed to be a magus, any more than to be a king? The same Plato, in another discourse, on a certain Zalmoxis, a man of Thracian race but of the same art, left it thus written: "And the charms are the noble words." If this is so, why should I not be permitted to know either the good words of Zalmoxis or the priestly rites of Zoroaster? But if, after the vulgar fashion, these men take a "magus" to be, in the strict sense, one who, by a communion of speech with the immortal gods, has power, by a certain incredible force of incantations, over everything he wishes — then I greatly wonder why they were not afraid to accuse a man whom they confess to have so great a power. For a power so hidden and divine cannot be guarded against, as other things can. He who summons an assassin to court comes attended; he who accuses a poisoner takes his food more scrupulously; he who arraigns a thief guards his goods. But he who brings on a capital charge a magus such as these men describe — with what attendants, with what precautions, with what guards is he to ward off a blind and inevitable destruction? With none, of course; and therefore a charge of this kind is not for the man who believes it to bring.

27. But these things are generally, by a certain common error of the ignorant, cast at philosophers, so that some of them — those who investigate the bare and simple causes of bodies — they reckon irreligious, and on that account say that they deny the gods: as Anaxagoras, and Leucippus, and Democritus, and Epicurus, and the other patrons of the nature of things; while others — those who search out the providence of the world more curiously and celebrate the gods more devoutly — these the common folk indeed call magicians, as if they also knew how to do the things they know are done; as of old were Epimenides, and Orpheus, and Pythagoras, and Ostanes; and afterward, likewise suspected, were the purifications of Empedocles, the daemon of Socrates, the Good of Plato. I congratulate myself, then, that I too am numbered among so many and so great men.

But for the rest, the things that were brought forward by them to prove the charge — empty and foolish things — I simply fear that you may count them charges only because they were brought forward. "Why," says he, "did you seek out certain kinds of fish?" As if it were not lawful for a philosopher to do, for the sake of knowledge, what would be lawful for a glutton for the sake of his appetite. "Why did a free woman marry you after thirteen years of widowhood?" As if it were not rather to be wondered at that for so many years she did not marry. "Why, before she married you, did she write I know not what in a letter, of how it seemed to her?" As if anyone ought to render the reasons of another's opinion. "But, being older, she did not spurn a young man." This very thing, then, is an argument that there was no need of magic — that a woman should wish to marry a man, a widow to marry a bachelor, an older woman a younger. And there are others like these: "Apuleius has something at home which he worships devoutly." As if it were not rather a crime to have nothing that you worship. "A boy fell down in Apuleius' presence." Why, what if a young man, what if even an old man, had collapsed while I stood by, hindered by some bodily ailment or slipping on the slippery ground? Is it by such arguments that you prove magic — the falling of a little boy, the marriage of a woman, and the buying of fish?

28. For my part, I might at small risk content myself with what I have already said, and conclude my plea; but since I have plenty of water left over, in proportion to the length of the accusation, come, if it seems good, let us consider each point. And I, for my part, will not deny anything that is alleged, whether it be true or false, but will confess it just as if it were done, so that all this great multitude, which has gathered from every side in such numbers to hear, may plainly understand that against philosophers nothing can be said truly, nor even falsely invented, which they would not, out of confidence in their innocence — though they might deny it — yet rather choose to defend. First, then, I will refute their arguments and prove that they have nothing to do with magic; next, even if I were a magician in the highest degree, I will nevertheless show that there was neither any cause nor any occasion for them to try me on any charge of sorcery. There also I will discuss the matter of false jealousy, and of the woman's letters wrongly read and still more wickedly interpreted, and of the marriage of myself and Pudentilla, and will show that it was undertaken by me for duty's sake rather than for gain. And this our marriage was — to Aemilianus here — a source of monstrous, I cannot say how great, anguish and vexation; thence arose all the anger and rage and at last the madness of undertaking this accusation. And if I show all this plainly and clearly, then at last, Claudius Maximus, I will call you and all who are present to witness, that this boy Sicinius Pudens, my stepson, under cover of whom and by whose wish I am accused by his uncle, was lately torn from my care — after his brother Pontianus, who was both older in years and better in character, met his death — and so was savagely turned, by no fault of mine, against me and against his own mother, abandoning liberal studies and rejecting all discipline; and that, by the wicked rudiments of this accusation, he is likely to grow more like his uncle Aemilianus than his brother Pontianus.

29. Now, as I set out to do, I will proceed to all the ravings of this Aemilianus, beginning with that which, as you observed, was stated at the outset as if it were the strongest ground for the suspicion of magic — that I sought out certain kinds of fish at a price through certain fishermen. Which, then, of these tells against me as suspicion of magic? That fishermen sought out a fish for me? (No doubt, then, the business ought to have been given to embroiderers or carpenters, and so the work of each trade exchanged, if I wished to avoid your slanders — that a carpenter might net me a fish, and a fisherman in return plane wood for me.) Or did you gather that little fish were sought for sorcery, from the fact that they were sought at a price? (No doubt, if I had wanted them for a banquet, I should have got them for nothing.) Why then do you not arraign me on many other counts as well? For I have often bought wine and vegetables and fruit and bread for a price. By that reasoning you decree famine to all the dainty-sellers; for who will dare to buy provisions from them, if it is laid down that all eatables which are got with money are wanted not for dinner but for magic? But if no suspicion remains either in the fishermen hired for a fee to do what they always do — to catch fish — (none of whom, however, did they produce as witnesses, since none existed), nor in the price itself of the merchandise (the amount of which, however, they fixed at nothing, lest, if they had named a small price, it should be despised, or a large one, it should not be believed) — if, as I say, there is no suspicion in these things: let Aemilianus answer me, by what nearest sign he was led to an accusation of magic.

30. "You seek fish," he says. I will not deny it. But, I ask you, is a man who seeks fish a magician? I think it no more so than if I were seeking hares, or boars, or fattened fowl. Or have fish alone something hidden, unknown to others but better known to magicians? If you know what this is, you are surely a magician; but if you do not know, you must needs confess that you accuse what you do not understand. Can you be so unschooled in all letters, in all the very tales of the common folk, that you cannot even invent these things plausibly? For what is there in a fish — a dull and cold thing, or anything at all sought from the sea — fitted to kindle the fire of love? Unless perhaps this led you into your lie, that Venus is said to have risen from the sea. Listen, if you please, Tannonius Pudens, to how many things you have failed to know, you who took fish as an argument for magic. But if you had read Virgil, you would surely have known that other things are wont to be sought for this purpose; for he, as far as I know, enumerates soft fillets, and rich vervain, and male frankincense, and threads of different colours, and besides, brittle laurel, durable clay, meltable wax — and no less the things he wrote in his serious work:

Plants of ripening growth, with the milk of black poison, are sought, reaped by moonlight with bronze sickles; sought too is the love-charm torn from the forehead of a new-born foal, snatched away before its mother could seize it.

But you, the accuser of fish, assign to magic far different instruments — not to be wiped from tender foreheads, but to be cut from scaly backs; not to be torn from the ground, but to be drawn from the deep; not to be reaped with sickles, but to be hooked with barbs. Finally, in his sorcery the poet names poison, you name a relish; he names herbs and twigs, you scales and bones; he plucks the meadow, you ransack the wave. I would have recalled to you Theocritus' parallels too, and others of Homer's, and very many of Orpheus', and would have fetched much from the Greek comedies and tragedies and histories, had I not noticed a while ago that you were unable to read Pudentilla's Greek letter. Therefore I will touch upon one Latin poet only, the very verses which those who have read Laevius will recognize:

31. all manner of love-charms they dig up from everywhere: the famous "antipathes" is sought, little wheels, nail-parings, fillets, little roots, herbs, twigs, two-tailed lizards as decoys, the lure of whinnying mares.

These and other things, far more plausibly than fish, you would have feigned that I sought (for to these, perhaps, through the report widely spread abroad, there might have been some credit), had you possessed any learning at all; but in truth, for what purpose does a fish, once caught, serve, except, when cooked, for a feast? For the rest, it seems to me to help nothing toward magic. I will say whence I conjecture this. Most men, who reckoned Pythagoras a follower of Zoroaster and likewise skilled in magic, have nevertheless handed down to memory that, when he had noticed, near Metapontum on the coast of that Italy of his — which he had made a supplementary Greece — a drag-net being hauled by certain fishermen, he bought the chance of their cast, and, the price being paid, ordered the fish that had been caught to be at once loosed from the nets and given back to the deep; which fish, assuredly, he would not have let go from his hands, had he found anything in them useful for magic. But that singularly learned man and emulator of the ancients remembered that Homer — a poet of much knowledge, or rather pre-eminently skilled in all things — had ascribed all the power of drugs not to the sea but to the earth, when he made mention of a certain sorceress in this fashion: "She who knew as many drugs as the broad earth nourishes." And likewise elsewhere in his verses: "where the grain-giving land bears very many drugs, many good when mixed, and many baleful." And yet never in Homer did anyone work a cure with anything of the sea or fishy: neither Proteus his shape, nor Ulysses his trench, nor Aeolus his wind-bag, nor Helen her mixing-bowl, nor Circe her cup, nor Venus her girdle. But you alone, of all human memory, are found to transfer the power of herbs and roots and twigs and pebbles — as if by some confusion of nature — from the highest mountains into the sea, and to sew it deep into the bellies of fish. Therefore, just as Mercury, the carrier of incantations, and Venus, the allurer of the soul, and the Moon, accomplice of the night, and Trivia, mistress of the shades, used to be summoned to the magicians' rites — so hereafter, on your authority, Neptune with Salacia and Portunus and all the chorus of Nereus shall be transferred from the tides of the straits to the tides of love.

32. I have said why I do not think there is any business between magicians and fish. Now, if it seems good, let us grant Aemilianus that fish are even wont to help toward magic powers. Does it then follow that whoever seeks them is himself a magician? On that reckoning, the man who seeks a small galley will be a pirate, and the man who seeks a crowbar a burglar, and the man who seeks a sword an assassin. You will name nothing in all the world so harmless that it cannot do some hurt in some way, nor anything so cheering that it cannot be construed toward sorrow. And yet not all things are therefore dragged toward a worse suspicion — as if you should suppose that frankincense and cassia and myrrh and the rest of such perfumes are bought only for a funeral, when they are got for medicine too, and for sacrifice. For the rest, by the same fish-argument you will reckon that Menelaus' companions also were magicians, who, as the foremost poet says, drove off hunger near the island of Pharos with bent hooks; you will refer to the same heading divers, too, and dolphins, and sea-onions, and likewise all gluttons who buy at great cost from the fishermen, and the very fishermen, who by their art procure fish of every kind. Why, then, do you ask? I am unwilling, indeed, nor do I count it necessary, to tell you; but do you, of yourself, if you can, prove that I sought them for this purpose. As if I had bought hellebore, or hemlock, or the juice of the poppy, and likewise other things of the same kind, of which the moderate use is wholesome but the mixing or the quantity is harmful — who would bear it with an even mind, if you arraigned me for poisoning on the score of these, because a man can be killed by them?

33. Let us see, however, what kinds of fish were so necessary to possess and so rare to find, that they were rightly sought with a stated reward. They named three in all: about one they were mistaken, about two they lied. Mistaken, in that they said it was a sea-hare, which was an altogether different fish, brought to me unbidden, for inspection, by our slave Themison, who is not unskilled in medicine, as you heard from him himself; for the hare he has not yet even found. But I profess that I seek out the rest too, having given the task not only to fishermen but also to my friends, that whatever fish of a less-known kind should turn up, they should either describe its form to me, or, if they cannot do that, show me the thing itself alive, or even dead. Why I do this I will presently explain. But my most cunning accusers — so they think themselves — lied, when, to put a finish to their slander, they invented that I had sought two sea-creatures by indecent names; which that Tannonius, since he wished the genitals of either sex to be understood, but, through his stammering, that great pleader could not bring himself to utter them, after much and long hesitation, at last named the male sea-creature by I know not what circumlocution, foully and basely; but the female part, finding no decent way to say it, took refuge in my writings, and read from a certain book of mine: "let her cover the cleft of the thighs with the screen of her thigh and the veil of her hand.

34. Here, too, with his characteristic gravity, he turned it to my reproach that I was not even ashamed to speak baser things in a decent fashion. But I, on the contrary, might more justly reproach him, that one who publicly professes himself a patron of eloquence should babble basely even of things decent to say, and should often, in matters by no means difficult, stammer, or fall altogether silent. For tell me — if I had said nothing about the statue of Venus, and had not named the "cleft," with what words, after all, would you have brought that charge so well suited both to your folly and to your tongue? Or is there anything more foolish than to conjecture a likeness of things from the nearness of their names? And perhaps you imagined you had hit very acutely upon it, in feigning that I sought these two sea-creatures for magical allurements — the "veretilla" and the "virginal"; learn, then, the Latin names of things, which I have on that account named in various ways, that, being fresh instructed, you may accuse again. Remember, nonetheless, that it would be as ridiculous an argument to claim that obscene sea-things were wanted for the affairs of love, as if you were to say that a sea-comb was sought for combing the hair, or a hawk-fish for fowling, or a boar-fish for hunting boars, or a sea-skull for raising the dead. I answer, then, to this passage of yours, contrived no less stupidly than absurdly, that I sought these sea-trifles and shoreline rubbish neither for a price nor for nothing.

35. This, too, I answer besides — that you did not know what you were feigning I had sought. For most of these worthless things which you named lie heaped and piled on all shores, and, without anyone's labour, when the little waves are however lightly stirred, roll out of their own accord. Why then do you not say that by the same labour, at great cost, through very many fishermen, I sought from the shore a ribbed shell with its grooved covering, a smooth pebble, and besides, the claws of crabs, the cups of sea-urchins, the tongues of cuttlefish, finally splinters, straws, little ropes, and the worm-eaten oyster-shells of Pergamum, and at last moss and seaweed, and the rest of the sea's leavings, which everywhere along the shores are driven by the winds, spat up by the brine, tossed to and fro by the storm, and abandoned in the calm? For to these things which I have mentioned suspicions can be fitted, in the same way, from their names, no less than to the others. You say that things spurious and bewitching, taken from the sea, can serve the affairs of love, because of the likeness of names: why might not, from the same shore, a pebble (calculus) serve the bladder (vesica), a shell (testa) a testament (testamentum), a crab (cancer) for ulcers (ulcera), seaweed (alga) for the shivering-fit (quercera)? Truly, Claudius Maximus, you are a man of too great patience and of an almost excessive kindness, who have, by Hercules, so long endured these argumentations of theirs; for my part, when these things were urged by them as if grave and conclusive, I laughed at their folly and marveled at your patience.

36. But for the rest — why I have already come to know very many fish, and am unwilling to remain ignorant of certain ones — let Aemilianus learn, since he so far concerns himself with my affairs; although he is now in the declining stage of life and in the sunset of old age, yet, if it seems good, let him receive instruction, late indeed and posthumous; let him read the monuments of the ancient philosophers, that he may at last understand that I was not the first to inquire into these things, but that my forebears did so long ago — I mean Aristotle and Theophrastus and Eudemus and Lyco and the other lesser followers of Plato, who left very many books on the breeding of animals, on their diet, on their parts, and on every difference among them. It is well that the cause is pleaded before you, Maximus, who, by your erudition, have surely read Aristotle's many-volumed works "On the Generation of Animals," "On the Anatomy of Animals," "On the History of Animals," and besides, his innumerable "Problems," and then those of the rest of the same school, in which various matters of this kind are treated. And if it was honourable and glorious for them to write down things sought out with such great care, why should it be base for us to investigate them — especially when I strive to write the same things, more methodically and concisely, in Greek and in Latin, and in all of them either to supply what was omitted or to fill out what was defective? Permit, if there is leisure, some passages of my magical writings to be read, that Aemilianus may know that I seek out and diligently explore more than he supposes. Bring out, you there, one of my Greek books, which my friends and assistants happened to have here, "On Questions of Natural Science," and that one especially in which more matters concerning the kinds of fish are treated. Meanwhile, while he is looking for it, I will tell a story fitting to the case.

37. The poet Sophocles, the rival and survivor of Euripides — for he lived to extreme old age — when he was accused by his own son of dementia, on the ground that he was now doting through age, is said to have brought out his "Oedipus at Colonus," that most excellent of his tragedies, which he happened to be then composing at that very time, and to have read it to the judges, and to have added nothing further for his defence, except that they might boldly condemn him for dementia if the old man's verses displeased them. Thereupon, I learn, all the judges rose up before so great a poet, bore him up with marvelous praises for the ingenuity of his plot and the loftiness of his eloquence, and came not so very far short, all of them, from condemning the accuser instead for dementia.

Have you found the book? You have made me glad. Come, then, let us try whether my own writings can be of service to me in court too. Read a little from the beginning, then some passages about fish. And you, meanwhile, while he reads, hold back the water-clock.

38. You have heard, Maximus, things most of which, no doubt, you had read in the ancient philosophers. And remember that these are volumes written by me about fish alone — which of them are begotten by their mating, which take shape from the slime, how often and at what season of the year the females of each kind are in heat and the males rut, by what members and on what grounds nature has distinguished those that are viviparous from those that are oviparous (for so I render in Latin what the Greeks call zoiotoka and oiotoka) — and, not to go laboriously through the generation of animals, then on the difference and the diet and the members and the ages and very many other things, necessary indeed to know, but out of place in a court of law. I will also order a few passages to be read from my Latin writings bearing on the same expertise, in which you will notice both memorable matters and rare to learn, and also names even unfamiliar to the Romans and, so far as I know, uncoined to this day — names which nevertheless, by my labour and study, are so derived from the Greek that they are yet struck in Latin coin. Or let your advocates, Aemilianus, tell us where they have read these words pronounced in Latin. I will speak of water-creatures only, and will not touch the other animals except in their common differences. Listen, then, to what I shall say. Soon you will cry out that I am running through magical names after the Egyptian or Babylonian rite: cartilaginous fish, mollusks, soft-shelled crustaceans, gristle-spined fish, hard-shelled creatures, sharp-toothed fish, amphibians, scaly fish, plated fish, skin-finned fish, web-footed creatures, solitary fish, gregarious fish — I could even go on; but it is not worth wasting the day on these, that I may have time to come to the rest. Meanwhile, recite these few things which I have mentioned, set forth in Latin by me.

39. Which, then, do you think — for a philosopher not of the rude and unlearned Cynic recklessness, but one who remembers that he belongs to the school of Plato — which do you think shameful for him: to know these things or not to know them, to neglect them or to attend to them, to recognize how great is the rational order of providence even in these things, or to believe about the immortal gods what his mother and father told him? Quintus Ennius wrote his "Hedyphagetica" in verse; he enumerates countless kinds of fish, which, of course, he had carefully come to know. I remember a few verses; I will recite them:

As the sea-weasel of Clupea surpasses all, so the mussels of Aenus, and the rough oysters most plentiful at Abydus. At Mytilene is the scallop, and near Ambracia the boar-fish of Charadrus. At Brundisium the bream is good; if it be large, take it. Know that the boar-fish is best at Tarentum; at Surrentum see you buy the sturgeon, and the glaucus at Cumae. And why have I passed over the parrot-wrasse, the very brain, almost, of supreme Jove — (this is caught, big and good, near the homeland of Nestor) — the black-tail, the thrush-wrasse, the merle-wrasse, and the sea-shade. At Corcyra the polyp, and the fat skulls of the maigre, the purple-fish, the little murex, the mussels, and the sweet sea-urchins too.

He adorned others, also, in many verses, and told where in the world each of them is found, and how, roasted or in sauce, it tastes best; nor is he for that reproached by the learned. Let me not be reproached, then, who write down, in their own elegant terms, in Greek and in Latin, things known to very few.

40. When I have said enough of this, then receive another point. For what, after all, if, being neither unstudious nor unskilled in medicine, I seek certain remedies from fish? For indeed there are very many, both scattered and sown abroad in all other things by the same bounty of nature, and likewise some in fish. Or do you think that to know remedies and to seek them out belongs to a magician rather than to a physician — rather, in short, than to a philosopher, who is to use them not for gain but for help? The ancient physicians, indeed, knew even charms as remedies for wounds, as Homer, the surest authority of all antiquity, teaches, who makes the blood flowing from Ulysses' wound be stanched by an incantation. For nothing that is done for the sake of bringing health is criminal. "But," he says, "for what purpose, save an evil one, did you cut open a fish, which the slave Themison brought to you?" As if I had not said a little before that I write about the parts of all animals, about their position and number and cause, and that I both explore with zeal and enlarge upon Aristotle's books of "Anatomies." And indeed I marvel exceedingly that you know of only one little fish inspected by me, when by now I have inspected very many, wherever and whenever they have been offered — especially since I do nothing in secret, but all things in the open, so that any chance bystander, even a stranger, may be present, after the manner and practice of my teachers, who say that a free and high-minded man ought, wherever he goes, to carry his mind on his very forehead. This very little fish, which you call a sea-hare, I showed to very many who were present; nor do I even yet decide what they call it, unless I should inquire more carefully, since I find no description of this fish's properties even among the ancient philosophers, although it is the rarest of all and, by Hercules, worth recording; for that fish alone, so far as I know, while it is otherwise boneless, has twelve bones, in the likeness of pigs' knuckle-bones, connected and chained together in its belly. Had Aristotle known this, he would surely never have failed to put it on record — he who recorded, as a great thing, that the little fish called the codling alone of all has its heart placed in the middle of its belly.

41. "You cut open a fish," he says. Who would tolerate that this is a charge in a philosopher, which would have been none in a butcher or a cook? "You cut open a fish." Is it because it was raw that you accuse it? If I were rummaging in the belly of a cooked one, and digging out its little livers — just as that little boy Sicinius Pudens learns to do, at your house, from his own dainties — you would not think the matter worth accusing; and yet it is a greater crime in a philosopher to eat fish than to inspect them. Or is it lawful for soothsayers to search out the entrails, but not lawful for a philosopher to contemplate them — a philosopher who knows himself to be the diviner of all animals, the priest of all the gods? Do you accuse in me that which both I and Maximus admire in Aristotle? Unless you expel his books from the libraries and wrest them from the hands of the studious, you cannot accuse me. But on this I have said almost more than I ought.

Now, besides, see how they confute themselves. They say that the woman was sought by me with magic arts and sea-allurements at that very time when they will not deny that I was in the inland mountains of Gaetulia, where fish are to be found only after the floods of Deucalion. Which I rejoice that these men do not know I have read — Theophrastus' "On Creatures that Bite and Sting," too, and Nicander's "Theriaca"; for otherwise they would demand that I be put on trial for poisoning as well. But indeed I took up this business from reading and from emulating Aristotle, with no small encouragement from my own Plato, who says that he who investigates these matters "plays in life a game that brings no regret.

42. Now, since their case about fish has been sufficiently laid bare, receive another, contrived with equal stupidity, but far more idly and wickedly. They themselves knew that the fish-argument was futile and would come to nothing, and besides that its novelty was ridiculous (for who ever heard tell that fish are wont to be scaled and unbacked for magical sorceries?), and that they had better feign something from matters more widely current and even believed. And so, after the prescription of opinion and report, they invented that a certain boy, charmed by an incantation, with witnesses removed, in a secret place, with a little altar and a lamp and a few conscious witnesses, where he was bewitched, fell down, and afterward was roused not knowing himself. Nor did they dare to advance their lie further; for, that the tale might be complete, this too ought to have been added — that the same boy foretold many things by prophecy. For this is the profit we get from incantations: foretelling and divination; and not only by the opinion of the vulgar, but also by the authority of learned men, is this marvel concerning boys confirmed. I remember reading, in the philosopher Varro, a man most carefully learned and erudite, among other things of the same kind, this also: that at Tralles, when men were consulting by magical inquiry about the outcome of the Mithridatic war, a boy, gazing at a reflection of Mercury in water, sang in a hundred and sixty verses the things that were to come. And likewise that Fabius, when he had lost five hundred denarii, came to Nigidius to consult him; that boys, roused by an incantation, disclosed where the purse was buried, with part of the money, and how the rest had been distributed; that even one denarius of that number was held by Marcus Cato the philosopher — which Cato confessed he had received from his footman among the offerings of Apollo.

43. These and other things I read in very many authors about magic and boys; but I am of doubtful judgment whether to say it can be so or to deny it — although I believe Plato when he holds that, between gods and men, certain powers of the divine, intermediate by nature and place, are set, and that these govern all divinations and the marvels of magicians; nay, I even reflect with myself that the human soul, and especially that of a boy, being simple, can, whether by the diversion of incantations or by the soothing of perfumes, be lulled to sleep, and estranged into a forgetfulness of present things, and, for a little while, the memory of the body being removed, be brought back and return to its own nature, which is, of course, immortal and divine, and so, as if in some slumber, foretell things to come. But in truth, however these matters stand, if any credit is to be given to such things, that prophetic boy — whoever he may be — ought, so far as I hear, to be chosen as both comely and unblemished in body and shrewd in mind and eloquent of speech, so that in him either the divine power may worthily lodge, as in a good house (if indeed it is enclosed in the boy's body), or his own soul, being roused, may be quickly brought back to its own power of divination, which, being readily implanted in it and wounded by no forgetfulness and dulled, may be easily resumed. For not from every wood, as Pythagoras used to say, ought a Mercury to be carved. If this is so, name the boy who was sound, unmaimed, gifted, comely, whom I thought worthy to initiate with a charm. But Thallus, whom you named, needs a physician rather than a magician; for the poor wretch is so wasted by the falling-sickness that, often three or four times a day, frequently without any incantations, he collapses, and racks all his limbs with convulsions, ulcerous of face, bruised on forehead and back of the head, dull of eye, gaping of nostril, faltering of foot. The greatest magician of all is he in whose presence Thallus has stood for any length of time: so generally, sinking with his malady as with sleep, does he topple over.

44. And yet you said that he was overthrown by my charms, because he happened once to fall down in my presence. Most of his fellow-slaves are present, whom you demanded to be produced. They can all tell you why they spit at the sight of Thallus, why no one dares to dine with him from the same dish or drink from the same cup. And why do I speak of slaves? You see them yourselves; deny that Thallus, long before I came to Oea, was wont to fall down with that malady, and was frequently shown to physicians; let his fellow-slaves, who are in your service, deny it: I will confess myself convicted of everything, unless... [the text is corrupt here] he was long ago banished to distant fields, that he might not contaminate the household: which that it was so done cannot even be denied by them. For this reason he could not be produced by us today. For as all this accusation was rash and sudden, two days ago Aemilianus served notice on us that we should produce fifteen slaves before you. Fourteen are present, who were in the town. Thallus alone, as I said, because he is far away in exile, about a hundred miles off — Thallus alone is absent, but we have sent someone to fetch him at full speed. Ask, Maximus, the fourteen slaves whom we produce, where the boy Thallus is and how well he is doing; ask the slaves of my accusers. They will not deny that he is a most loathsome boy, of rotten and diseased body, epileptic, barbarous, rustic. A fine boy you have chosen indeed, whom one might bring to a sacrifice, whose head one might touch, whom one might clothe in a pure cloak, from whom one might look for an oracle! By Hercules, I wish he were here: I would have handed him over to you, Aemilianus, and would have held him while you questioned him; already, in the middle of the inquiry, here, before the very tribunal, he would have turned his savage eyes upon you, foaming would have spat in your face, would have clenched his hands, shaken his head, and at last collapsed into your bosom.

45. The fourteen slaves you demanded I produce. Why do you not use them for any inquiry? You ask for one boy, and that an epileptic, whom you know to have long been absent, just as I do. What other slander is more evident? Fourteen slaves are present at your request, and you pretend not to see them; one little boy is absent, and him you arraign. Finally, what do you want? Suppose Thallus were present: do you want to prove that he fell down in my presence? I confess it of my own accord. Do you say it was done by a charm? Of this the boy knows nothing, and I refute that it was done; for that the boy is epileptic not even you will dare to deny. Why then should his falling be attributed to a charm rather than to his disease? Or could it not have happened that, by chance, in my presence, he suffered the same thing which he often suffered at other times in the presence of many? But if I thought it a great matter to throw down an epileptic, what need was there of a charm, when burnt jet-stone, as I read in the natural philosophers, beautifully and easily tests this disease — by whose smell men commonly try, even in slave-markets, the health or sickness of those for sale? Even a potter's wheel, whirled round, not without difficulty seizes a man of the same malady with its giddiness, so that the spectacle of its spinning weakens an already wounded mind; and a potter is far more potent to throw down epileptics than a magician. You demanded in vain that I produce slaves: I, not without cause, demand that you name what witnesses were present at this expiatory rite, when I, as you say, pushed the falling Thallus. You name one only, that little boy Sicinius Pudens, in whose name you accuse me; for he says that he was present. Even if his boyhood were no objection to the testimony's reliability, yet his being an accuser would rob it of credit. It would have been easier, Aemilianus, and far more telling, for you to say that you yourself were present and that from that rite you began to lose your wits, rather than to make over the whole business, as a child's plaything, to boys. A boy fell, a boy saw: did some boy, too, do the enchanting?

46. Here Tannonius Pudens, cunningly enough, when he saw that this lie too was growing cold and was now all but hissed off the stage by the looks and murmurs of all, in order to detain at least the suspicions of certain people by hope, said that he would produce other boys who had likewise been enchanted by me, and so passed over to another sort of argument. Which, although I might pretend not to notice, yet, as I do with everything, this too I challenge of my own accord. For I am eager that those boys be produced, whom, I hear, have been encouraged to lie by the hope of freedom. But I say no more: let them produce them. I demand, then, and insist, Tannonius Pudens, that you fulfil your promise. Bring forth those boys in whom you trust: produce them, name who they are. You may use my water-time for this. Speak, I say, Tannonius. Why are you silent, why do you delay, why do you look about you? But if this man does not know what he learned, or has forgotten the names, then you, Aemilianus, come forward, say what you charged your advocate to do, produce the boys. Why have you turned pale? Why are you silent? Is this to accuse, is this to lay so great a charge — or is it to make a mockery of Claudius Maximus, so great a man, and to harass me with slander? But if perchance your advocate has slipped in a word and you have no boys to produce, at least make some use of the fourteen slaves whom I produced.

47. Or why did you demand that so large a household be brought forward? Accusing me of magic, you served notice for fifteen slaves: why, if you were accusing me of violence, how many slaves, after all, would you demand? So then, fifteen slaves know something, and it is hidden. Or is it not hidden, and is it magic? You must necessarily confess one of these two things: either that the thing was not unlawful, in which I did not fear so many witnesses; or, if it was unlawful, that so many witnesses ought not to have known of it. This magic, as far as I hear, is a thing put under the ban of the laws, forbidden from of old by the Twelve Tables on account of incredible blightings of crops, and is therefore hidden no less than foul and horrible, generally kept watch through the nights and buried in darkness, solitary as to witnesses and muttered in incantations — to which not only few of slaves, but even few of free men, are admitted: and do you wish fifteen slaves to have been present? Was it a wedding, or some other crowded ceremony, or a seasonable banquet? Do fifteen slaves share in a magic rite, like the fifteen men appointed to perform the sacred rites? But for what purpose should I have admitted so many in number, if even a few are too many for a secret? Fifteen free men are a populace, as many slaves a household, as many fettered men a chain-gang. Or was their multitude necessary as a help, to hold the expiatory victims for a long time? But you named no victims except hens. Or was it to count the grains of incense, or to throw down Thallus?

48. You said, too, that a free woman, suffering from the same malady as Thallus, was brought to me at my house, whom I promised to cure, and that she too, enchanted by me, fell down. As I see, you have come to accuse a wrestling-master, not a magician: thus you say that all who came near me fell. Yet Themison the physician, by whom the woman was brought to me for inspection, denied — when you asked him, Maximus — that she suffered anything further than that I asked her whether her ears rang, and which of them more; and when she answered that her right ear was too much disturbed, I at once dismissed her. Here I, Maximus, although for the present I diligently refrain from your praises, lest anywhere, for the sake of this case, I should seem to flatter you, yet cannot but praise your shrewdness in questioning. For a while ago, when these things were being discussed, and they said the woman was enchanted, and the physician who had been present denied it, you asked, very prudently indeed, what profit there had been to me in enchanting her. They answered: "That the woman might fall." "What then? Did she die?" you say. They denied it. "What, then, do you say? What good did it do Apuleius, if she fell?" For so beautifully and persistently did you ask a third time, as one who knew that the reasons for all deeds must be more diligently examined, and that the causes are more often inquired into, while the deeds are granted; and that for this very reason the advocates of litigants are called pleaders of causes, because they set forth why each thing was done. But to deny a deed is an easy matter, and needs no advocate: to show that a deed was rightly or wrongly done — that, indeed, is far more arduous and difficult. In vain, then, is it inquired whether a thing was done, which had no bad cause for being done. So the man charged with a deed is freed, before a good judge, from the scruple of the inquiry, if he had no motive for sinning. Now, since they have proved the woman neither enchanted nor thrown down, and I do not deny that she was inspected by me at the physician's request, I will tell you, Maximus, why I asked that about the ringing of the ears — not so much to clear myself in that matter, which you have already prejudged to border on neither fault nor crime, as that I might not pass over in silence anything worthy of your ears and consonant with your learning. I will tell it, then, as briefly as I can; for you are to be reminded by me, not instructed.

49. Plato the philosopher, in that most illustrious "Timaeus," having framed the whole world with a certain heavenly eloquence — he, then, after he had most skilfully discoursed about the three powers of our soul too, and had most aptly taught why each of our members was fashioned for us by divine providence, reckons up the cause of all diseases under three heads. The first cause he assigns to the first elements of the body, if the very qualities of the elements — the moist and the cold, and the two opposite to these — do not agree; and this comes about when any one of them has either exceeded its measure or removed from its place. The next cause of diseases lies in the fault of those things which, already compounded from the simple elements, have nonetheless coalesced into one kind — such as the kind of blood, and of flesh, and of bone, and of marrow, and further, those things which are mixed from these single substances. Thirdly, in the body, the concretions of various bile and turbid breath and thick humour are the latest provokers of sicknesses.

50. Of which number the chief is the matter of the falling-sickness, of which I have begun to speak, when the flesh dissolves, by a hostile fire, into a thick and foaming humour, and, breath being generated from the same source, from the whiteness of the compressed air there flows a whitish and swollen corruption. For if that corruption breathes out to the exterior of the body, it spreads with more disgrace than harm; for it marks the outer skin of the breast with white blotches and varies it with every kind of stain. But whoever this has befallen is never afterward attacked by the falling-sickness; thus he balances a most grievous sickness of the mind by a slight disfigurement of the body. But if that pernicious sweetness, held within and joined with black bile, has raged and spread through all the veins, and then, having forced a way to the topmost head, has mingled its dread flux with the brain, it forthwith weakens the royal part of the soul, which, strong in reason, has taken its seat in the crown of a man's head as in a citadel and palace. For it overwhelms and disturbs its divine ways and wise passages; which it does with less harm during sleep, when it presses, with a moderate strangling that is the forerunner of the falling-sickness, those who are full of drink and food. But if it has so far increased that it is poured even over the head of the waking, then indeed, by a sudden clouding of the mind, they grow numb, and, the body dying, the soul failing, they fall. This our people have truly named not only the major sickness and the falling-sickness, but even the divine sickness — just as the Greeks call it the "sacred disease" — namely because it does violence to the rational part of the soul, which is by far the most holy.

51. You recognize, Maximus, Plato's reasoning, expounded as clearly as I could for the occasion; and I, trusting it, and judging the cause of the divine sickness to be when that plague has flowed back into the head, do not at all seem to have inquired about nothing when I asked whether that woman had a heavy head, a stiff neck, throbbing temples, ringing ears. But that she confessed the more frequent ringings in her right ear was a sign that the disease was driven deep within; for the right parts of the body are the stronger, and therefore leave the less hope of recovery when they too succumb to sickness. Aristotle indeed left it written in his "Problems" that, in whatever epileptics the disease begins from the right, theirs is the harder to cure. It would be tedious, if I wished to review Theophrastus' opinion too about the same disease; for he too has an excellent book on epileptics. To whom, nonetheless, in another book, which he wrote on grudging animals, he says that the cast skins of geckos are a remedy — which they cast off, like old age, after the manner of other serpents, at fixed seasons; but unless you snatch them away at once, whether by malignant foreknowledge or by natural appetite, they straightway turn and devour them. I have mentioned these things on this account, and have diligently named at once the discussions and the books of noble philosophers, and have wished to touch upon none of the physicians or the poets, that these men may cease to wonder if philosophers, by their own learning, know the causes of diseases and their remedies. Therefore, since a sick woman was brought to me to be inspected for the sake of treatment, and since it is agreed, both by the confession of the physician who brought her to me and by my own reasoning, that this was rightly done, either let them lay it down that to cure diseases belongs to a magician and a malefactor, or, if they dare not say this, let them confess that, in the case of the epileptic boy and woman, they have leveled empty and utterly tumbling slanders.

52. Nay rather, if you would have the truth, Aemilianus, you are the epileptic one, who have already fallen by so many slanders. For it is no graver to collapse in body than in heart, to topple over with the foot rather than with the mind, to be spat upon in the bedchamber than to be execrated in this most splendid assembly. But you, perhaps, think yourself sound, because you are not kept at home, but follow your madness wherever it has led you. And yet match, if you will, your own frenzy with the frenzy of Thallus: you will find no great difference, except that Thallus rages against himself, while you rage against others too. For the rest, Thallus rolls his eyes, you the truth; Thallus clenches his hands, you your advocates; Thallus is dashed against the pavements, you against the tribunals; finally, he does whatever he does in sickness, and sins unknowingly: but you, wretch, offend knowingly and wittingly, so great is the force of the disease that goads you on; you allege the false for the true, you make a crime of the undone as of the done, the man whom you clearly know to be innocent you nevertheless accuse as guilty.

53. There is more besides — a point I passed over. There are things you admit you do not know, and yet these same things you make a charge of, as if you knew them. For you say that I kept certain objects wrapped in a little linen cloth among the household gods of Pontianus. What those wrapped things were, and of what kind, you confess you do not know, nor is there anyone else who saw them; yet you maintain they were the instruments of magic. Let no one flatter you, Aemilianus: there is no cunning in this accusing of yours, nor even any impudence — lest you should think there is. What is it, then? It is the wretched frenzy of an embittered mind, and the pitiable madness of a raw and unripe old age. For in pretty nearly these words you addressed a judge so weighty and so clear-sighted: "Apuleius kept certain things wrapped in a bit of linen among the household gods of Pontianus. Since I do not know what these things were, on that very account I maintain that they were magical. Believe me, then, in what I say, because I say what I do not know." What splendid arguments, and how plainly they convict the accused! "It was so, since I do not know what it was." You alone, Aemilianus, have been found out to know even the things you do not know; so far above all men have you been carried in your folly — seeing that the most skilful and acute of the philosophers say that not even the things we see are to be trusted, while you make assertions even about the things you have neither ever beheld nor heard of. If Pontianus were alive and you were to question him as to what was in that wrapping, he would answer that he did not know. There stands the freedman who to this day holds the key of that place and stands on your side: he says that he never looked inside, although he himself opened it, being the keeper of the books that were stored there, almost daily, and shut it again; that he often went in with us, much oftener alone; that he saw the linen lying on the table without any seal, without any fastening. And why not? Magical articles were being hidden inside it: I kept it all the more carelessly for that, I exposed it carelessly to be freely searched and inspected at pleasure, even to be carried off, I entrusted it to another's keeping, I left it to another's discretion. What, then, do you wish to be believed at this present? That the thing which Pontianus did not know — Pontianus, who lived with me in an unbroken intimacy — is known to you, whom I never saw except before the tribunal? Or that what the freedman, constantly at hand and with every opportunity of inspecting it, did not see, you saw — you who never came near the place? Finally, grant that what you did not see was such as you say: yet, you fool, if today you had intercepted that little cloth, whatever you produced out of it, I should deny was magical.

54. I even allow you this: imagine whatever you like, invent it, devise something that could appear magical: yet even so I would contend with you about it. I should say either that it had been planted, or received as a remedy, or handed down in a religious rite, or enjoined in a dream; there are a thousand other grounds on which I could refute you truly, by common usage and the most familiar custom of religious observance. As it is, you demand that a thing which, even if it had been seized and held, would nevertheless do me no harm before a good judge, should condemn me on the strength of an empty suspicion, uncertain and unknown. Perhaps you will say again, as you are wont: "What, then, was that which you wrapped in linen and laid up, of all places, among the household gods?" Is that your way, Aemilianus? Do you accuse like this — questioning the defendant about everything, bringing forward nothing ascertained yourself? "Why do you look for fish? Why did you examine a sick woman? What did you keep in the cloth?" Did you come to accuse or to interrogate? If to accuse, then prove the things you say yourself; if to interrogate, do not pronounce beforehand what the thing was, since you are obliged to ask precisely because you do not know. But indeed, on these terms all men will be set up as defendants, if the man who has lodged an information against anyone is under no necessity of proving it, while he has every facility of questioning. For in this way, just as a charge of magic is fastened on someone, anything at all that a man may have done will be thrown in his teeth. "You set the mark of a vow on the thigof some statue: therefore you are a magician; or else, why did you mark it? You offered silent prayers to the gods in a temple: therefore you are a magician; or else, what did you pray for?" On the other hand: "You prayed for nothing in the temple: therefore you are a magician; or else, why did you not entreat the gods?" In like manner, if you have set down some offering, if you have sacrificed, if you have taken a sprig of vervain. The day would fail me, if I wished to follow out all the things for which a slanderer would in the same way demand a reason. Especially as everything whatsoever that is stored, that is sealed, that is shut away and kept in the house, will all, by the same argument, be called magical, or be dragged out of the storeroom into the forum and into court.

55. How great these matters are, and of what kind, Maximus, and how wide a field is opened to slander by this path of Aemilianus, and what sweats are brought upon the innocent by this one little cloth, I could indeed dispute at greater length; but I will do what I set out to do: I will confess even what is not necessary, and, when questioned by Aemilianus, I will answer. You ask, Aemilianus, what I kept in the cloth. Now, although I could altogether deny that any cloth of mine was placed in the library of Pontianus, and, even if I were to grant fully that there was one, could still say that nothing was wrapped in it — and if I were to say this, I could be refuted neither by any testimony nor by any argument, for there is no one who touched it, the one freedman, as you say, who saw it — yet, I say, for all I care, let it have been crammed full. Think of it so, if you will, as once the companions of Ulysses thought they had found a treasure, when they were pilfering a bag full of nothing but wind. Do you wish me to tell you what sort of things they were that I wrapped in the cloth and entrusted to the household gods of Pontianus? Your wish shall be granted. I have shared in very many sacred initiations in Greece. Certain tokens and memorials of these, given to me by the priests, I diligently preserve. I say nothing unusual, nothing unknown. Even the initiates of Father Liber alone, you who are present, know what you keep hidden at home and venerate in silence apart from all the uninitiated. But I, as I said, have learned manifold sacred rites, very many ceremonies, and various religious observances, out of zeal for truth and duty toward the gods. Nor do I compose this for the occasion; for it is now about three years since, in the first days after I had come to Oea, discoursing in public on the majesty of Aesculapius, I declared these same things openly and recounted how many rites I knew. That discourse is most widely current, is commonly read, passes through everyone's hands, commended to the devout people of Oea not so much by my eloquence as by the mention of Aesculapius. Let someone say, if anyone perhaps remembers, the opening of that passage. — Do you hear, Maximus, the many who prompt it? Why, look, the very book is offered me. I will order these very words to be read out, since you show

56. by your most kindly look that you do not find such a hearing burdensome. — Can it then seem strange to anyone who has any recollection of religion, that a man initiated into so many mysteries of the gods should keep at home certain holy tokens of the sacred rites, and should wrap them in a linen cloth, which is the purest of coverings for things divine? For wool, the sluggish body's excrement, stripped from the sheep, is from the very precepts of Orpheus and Pythagoras a profane garment; whereas the spotless crop of flax, sprung from the earth among the choicest of fruits, is used by the most holy priests of the Egyptians not only for clothing and covering, but for veiling sacred things as well. And I know that some men, and chief among them this Aemilianus, make a jest of mocking things divine. For, as I hear from some of the people of Oea who know him, he has to this day made supplication to no god, has frequented no temple; if he passes any shrine, he counts it a sin to lift his hand to his lips in reverence. Indeed, even to the gods of husbandry, who feed and clothe him, he gives no first-fruits of any crop or vine or flock; in his farm stands no chapel, no place or grove is consecrated. Why do I speak of grove and chapel? Those who have been there say they have not seen even one anointed stone or one garlanded bough within his borders. Two surnames, therefore, have been bestowed on him: Charon, as I said already, for the grimness of his face and his temper; but the other, which he hears with more pleasure, for his contempt of the gods — Mezentius. And so I readily understand that these enumerations of so many initiations seem to him mere trifles, and that perhaps, out of this defiance of the divine, he cannot bring himself to think true what I have said — that I keep, most reverently, the tokens and memorials of so many sacred rites. But I would not turn my hand for what Mezentius thinks of me; to the rest, however, I declare in the clearest voice: if anyone is present who shares in those same solemnities of mine, let him give the sign, and you may hear what things I keep. For I, in truth, shall never be driven by any peril to divulge to the profane what I have received under the seal of silence.

57. As I think, Maximus, I seem to have satisfied the mind of anyone, even the most hostile, and, as regards the cloth, to have wiped away every stain of the charge; and now, with good warrant of safety, I am ready to pass from the suspicions of Aemilianus to that testimony of Crassus which they read out after these matters as if it were the weightiest of all. You heard read from a written deposition the testimony of a certain glutton and desperate gormandizer, Junius Crassus, that I had repeatedly performed nocturnal rites in his house, together with my friend Appius Quintianus, who lodged there for hire. And this, Crassus says, although at that time he was actually at Alexandria, he yet learned from the smoke of the torch and the feathers of birds. To be sure, while he was making the round of the drinking-parties at Alexandria — for this Crassus is a man who not unwillingly creeps off by daylight into the cookshops — in that reek of the tavern he caught, like a fowler, the feathers wafted from his own household gods, and recognized the smoke of his own house, risen afar from his ancestral roof. If he saw it with his eyes, then he is more keen-sighted than the prayers and longings of Ulysses; for Ulysses, gazing for many years from the shore for the smoke rising from his own land, vainly strained to catch it; but Crassus, in the few months of his absence, saw that same smoke without any effort, sitting in a wine-shop. Or if, on the other hand, he perceived the reek of his own house with his nostrils, then again he surpasses dogs and vultures in keenness of scent; for to what dog, to what vulture of the Alexandrian sky, could anything smell all the way from the borders of Oea? This Crassus is indeed a consummate gormandizer, and not unskilled in every kind of smoke; but assuredly, given his zeal for drinking, by which alone he is reckoned, the breath of wine would reach him at Alexandria more easily than that of smoke.

58. He understood himself that this would seem incredible; for it is said that before the second hour of the day, still fasting and unfortified with wine, he sold that testimony. So he wrote that he had learned these things in this manner: that after he returned from Alexandria, he made straight for his house, from which Quintianus had already moved out; that there, in the vestibule, he came upon many birds' feathers, and besides that the walls disfigured with soot; that he asked the reason of his slave, whom he had left behind at Oea, and the slave informed him about the nocturnal rites of myself and Quintianus. But how cunningly contrived it is, and how plausibly invented, that I, if I had wished to do anything of the sort, would not rather have done it in my own house; that this Quintianus, who stands beside me — whom I name, for honour's and praise's sake, on account of the very close friendship I have with him, and on account of his outstanding learning and most perfect eloquence — that this Quintianus, then, if he had had any birds at dinner, or, as they say, had killed any for magic's sake, had no slave-boy to sweep up the feathers and throw them outside; and besides, that the force of the smoke was so great as to make the walls black, and that Quintianus endured this disfigurement in his bedchamber as long as he lived there. You say nothing, Aemilianus; it is not plausible — unless perhaps Crassus, on his return, did not make straight for his bedchamber, but, after his manner, went directly to the kitchen hearth. But from what did Crassus's slave conjecture that the walls had been smoked precisely at night? Was it from the colour of the smoke? No doubt night-smoke is blacker, and so differs from day-smoke. And why did so suspicious and so diligent a slave allow Quintianus to move out before he had restored the house to cleanliness? Why did those feathers, as if of lead, await the coming of Crassus so long? Let Crassus not lay the charge upon his slave: he himself rather invented all this about the soot and the feathers, since not even in giving testimony can he get any farther from the kitchen.

59. But why was the testimony read from a written deposition? Where in the world is Crassus himself? Has he gone back to Alexandria out of weariness of his house? Is he scrubbing his walls? Or, what is nearer the truth, is the gormandizer laid low by a debauch? For I myself yesterday, here at Sabrata, noticed him very conspicuously belching at you, Aemilianus, in the middle of the forum. Ask your nomenclators, Maximus — although he is better known to the tavern-keepers than to the nomenclators — yet, I say, inquire whether they have seen this Junius Crassus of Oea; they will not deny it. Let Aemilianus produce to us this most honourable youth, on whose testimony he relies. You see what time of day it is: I say that Crassus has long since been snoring drunk, or, after a second bath taken to enable him to attend the after-dinner carousal, is sweating out his wine-soaked perspiration in the baths. He speaks to you, Maximus, present though absent, through a written deposition — not but that he is so utterly lost to all shame that, even if he were under your eyes, he would lie without any blush; but perhaps he could not so much as restrain himself in his tippling to await this hour sober: or rather, Aemilianus did it of set purpose, that he might not station him under your so stern eyes, lest you should reject that brute, with his plucked jaws and foul aspect, on the very sight of his face, when you had observed the youth's head ravaged of beard and hair, his rheumy eyes, his swollen eyelids, his gaping mouth, his slobbering lips, his discordant voice, the trembling of his hands, his belching breath. His whole patrimony he licked away long ago, and nothing remains to him of his father's goods but one house, fit for retailing slander, which yet he never let out at a dearer rate than for this testimony; for that drunken lie he sold to this Aemilianus for three thousand sesterces, and there is no one at Oea who is ignorant of it.

60. We all knew of this before it was done, and I could have hindered it by a formal protest, had I not known that a lie so foolish would harm Aemilianus, who was buying it to no purpose, rather than me, who deservedly despised it. I wished both that Aemilianus should suffer the loss and that Crassus should be set up for prostitution by the disgrace of his testimony. For the rest, the affair was carried through, the day before yesterday, by no means in secret, in the house of one Rufinus — of whom I shall speak presently — Rufinus himself and Calpurnianus acting as go-betweens and intercessors. And Rufinus accomplished this all the more gladly because he was sure that Crassus would pass on no small part of his reward to his wife, whose adulteries he knowingly winks at. I saw that you too, Maximus, in your wisdom, suspecting their cabal and conspiracy against me the moment that deposition was brought forward, spurned the whole business with your countenance. In short, although they are endowed with an unusual audacity and a troublesome impudence, yet — seeing that the testimony of Crassus had, as they perceived, smelt of the lees — they themselves did not dare to read it through, nor to lean upon it for anything. But I have recalled these things, not because I feared, with you for judge above all, the scarecrows of feathers and the stain of soot, but that it might not go unpunished in Crassus that he sold gross smoke to Aemilianus, a country bumpkin.

61. One charge more was brought forward by them, when they were reading the letters of Pudentilla, concerning the fashioning of a certain little statue, which they say I had procured for magical sorceries, made of the choicest wood by a secret craft, and which, although it is in the shape of a skeleton, foul and horrible, I yet cultivate at great cost and call by the Greek name "king." Unless I am mistaken, I am following their footsteps in order, and, taking each point one by one, I am unweaving the whole web of slander. The fashioning of the statue, which you call secret, how can it have been secret, when you were so far from being ignorant of its maker that you summoned him to be present here? See, here is Cornelius Saturninus, the craftsman, a man both praised among his fellows for his art and approved for his character, who a little while ago, when you questioned him diligently, Maximus, recounted the whole course of the matter to you with the utmost good faith and truth: how I, when I had seen at his shop many geometrical figures of boxwood, finely and skilfully made, being attracted by his craftsmanship, asked him to work out for me certain mechanical contrivances, and at the same time to carve me some image, of whatever god he liked, to which I might make supplication after my custom, of whatever material, provided only it was of wood. So at first he tried boxwood. Meanwhile, while I was in the country, my stepson Sicinius Pontianus, who wished it done for me, obtained some little caskets of ebony from a most honourable lady, Capitolina, brought them to him, and urged him to make it rather of that rarer and more durable material; that gift would be especially welcome to me. He did accordingly, as far as the caskets sufficed. And so, fitted together piece by piece out of the little tablets to a certain thickness, a little Mercury could be wrought.

62. All this, as I say, you have heard. Moreover, the same things were said by the son of Capitolina, a most upright young man, who is present, when you questioned him: that Pontianus had asked for the caskets, that Pontianus had brought them to Saturninus the craftsman. Nor is even this denied — that Pontianus received the finished statue from Saturninus, and afterward gave it to me as a gift. All these things being proved openly and plainly, what at all remains in which any suspicion of magic can lurk? Nay, what is there at all that does not convict you of manifest falsehood? You said that the thing was secretly made which Pontianus, a most distinguished knight, saw to the making of; which Saturninus, a man of weight and well known among his fellows for his honesty, carved openly, sitting in his own shop; which a most accomplished matron helped with her gift; which both before and after the making was known to many, both of the slaves and of the friends who used to come to me. The wood, that I sought through the whole town — and indeed sought hard for it — you were not ashamed to make up, though you know I was away at that time, though it has been proved that I ordered it to be made of whatever material.

63. Your third falsehood was that there had been fashioned a lean, nay an utterly disembowelled, shape of a grim corpse, downright horrible and ghoulish. Now if you had ascertained so evident a sign of magic, why did you not formally call on me to produce it? Was it that you might be free to lie about a thing that was not there? Yet the means of that falsehood was taken from you by a certain happy chance of my habit. For I make it my custom, wherever I go, to carry the image of some god hidden among my books, and on feast-days to make supplication to it with incense and wine and sometimes a victim. So just now, when I heard a "skeleton" so impudently and so falsely talked of again and again, I bade someone go at a run and fetch from my lodging the little Mercury which this Saturninus fashioned for me at Oea. Hand it over, you — let them see it, hold it, examine it. There you have what that wretch called a skeleton. Do you hear the outcry of all who are present? Do you hear the condemnation of your falsehood? Are you not at last ashamed of so many slanders? Is this a skeleton, is this a ghoul, is this what you kept calling a demon? Is this image magical, or solemn and ordinary? Take it, I pray you, Maximus, and contemplate it: it is well that a consecrated thing should be handed to hands so pure and so pious as yours. See how comely its face is, and full of the bloom of the wrestling-school; how cheerful the god's countenance; how gracefully the down creeps over either cheek; how the curled hair appears on his head beneath the rim of his cap; how prettily the two little wings stand out above his temples; how festively the garment is gathered up about his shoulders. The man who dares to call this a skeleton assuredly either sees no images of the gods at all, or neglects them all; and the man, finally, who thinks this a ghoul is himself the ghoul-haunted one.

64. But to you, Aemilianus, in return for that falsehood, may that god who is the messenger between the powers above and below grant the ill-will of both sets of gods, and ever set before your eyes the shapes of the dead to meet you, whatever there is anywhere of shades, whatever of spectres, whatever of departed spirits, whatever of ghouls — all the apparitions of the night, all the terrors of the funeral pyre, all the frights of the tomb — from which, for all that, in age and in desert you are not far off. But we of the Platonic household know nothing but what is festive and joyful and solemn and lofty and heavenly. Indeed, in its zeal for the heights, that school has explored certain things even loftier than heaven itself, and has stood on the outermost back of the universe. Maximus knows that I speak the truth, who has read in the Phaedrus, diligently, of "the place beyond the heavens" and "the back of heaven." The same Maximus understands very well — to answer you about the name also — who that "king" is, named so not first by me but by Plato: "About the king of all things are all things, and for his sake are all things" — who that king is, the cause and reason and original source of all the nature of things, the supreme begetter of the soul, the everlasting preserver of living creatures, the unwearied maker of his own world, yet a maker without labour, a preserver without care, a begetter without propagation; comprehended by no place, no time, no change whatever, and therefore conceivable by few, expressible by none.

65. Look, I freely heighten the suspicion of magic: I do not answer you, Aemilianus, what "king" it is that I worship; nay, if the proconsul himself should ask me what my god is, I keep silence. Of the name I have for the present said enough. As for what remains, I myself am not unaware that some of the bystanders desire to hear why I chose to have my image made not of silver or gold, but of wood above all; and this, I think, they desire not so much to find fault as to learn, that they may be freed from this scruple too, when they see every suspicion of the charge abundantly confuted. Hear, then, you whose care it is to learn — but with your mind as upright and attentive as you can make it, as though you were about to hear the very words of Plato, now an old man, from the last book of the Laws: "A man of measure, in dedicating offerings to the gods, ought to give measured ones. The earth, then, and the hearth of every dwelling are sacred to all men, of all the gods; let no one, therefore, consecrate sacred things to the gods a second time" — this he forbids in order that no one may dare to set up shrines privately; for he holds it enough that the citizens have public temples for the immolation of victims — then he adds: "Gold and silver, in other cities, both in private hands and in temples, are a possession that breeds envy; ivory, from a body that has left its soul behind, is no gracious offering; iron and bronze are instruments of war; but of wood, let a man dedicate whatever he will, made of a single block, and of stone likewise." As the assent of all has declared, Maximus, and you who sit in council, I seem to have used Plato most fittingly, as the master of my life, so the patron of my cause, to whose laws you see me obedient.

66. Now it is time to turn beforehand to the letters of Pudentilla — or rather to fetch the whole order of the matter from a little higher up, so that it may lie open most plainly to all that I, who they keep saying invaded the house of Pudentilla out of greed for gain, ought, if I had thought of any gain at all, always to have fled from that house, since in other respects too the match was anything but prosperous — indeed, hostile to me, had not the woman herself balanced so many disadvantages by her virtues. For no other cause can be found, save empty envy, which has kindled against me both this trial and, before it, many perils of my life. For why should Aemilianus be moved, even if he had truly found me out to be a magician — a man who has been injured by no deed of mine, nor by so much as the slightest word of mine, that he should seem to be going to avenge himself deservedly? Nor again does he accuse me for glory's sake, as Marcus Antonius accused Gnaeus Carbo, Gaius Mucius accused Aulus Albucius, Publius Sulpicius accused Gnaeus Norbanus, Gaius Furius accused Manius Aquilius, Gaius Curio accused Quintus Metellus. For those most learned young men undertook this, the first exercise of their forensic labour, for praise's sake, that by some notable prosecution they might become known to their fellow-citizens. This custom, granted among the ancients to young beginners as a means of displaying the flower of their talent, has long since fallen into disuse. And even if it were now common, still it would have been far from this fellow; for neither would a parade of eloquence have suited an unlettered and ignorant man, nor a desire of glory a rustic and a barbarian, nor the undertaking of advocacies an old man at the grave's edge — unless, perhaps, Aemilianus, true to his severity, has set an example, and, out of hatred for the very crimes themselves, has taken up this accusation for the integrity of his morals. But this I could scarcely have believed of Aemilianus — not this African here, but that famous Africanus and Numantinus and Censorius besides: let me not believe of this stump of a man that he has in him not only hatred of misdeeds, but even the understanding of them.

67. What is it, then? It is clearer than anything to anyone that there is no other cause but envy which has spurred this man, and Herennius Rufinus, his instigator (of whom I shall speak presently), and the rest of my enemies, to weave together these slanders of magic. There are, then, five points which I must discuss. For, if I remember rightly, as regards Pudentilla they brought these charges: one point is that they said she had never wished to marry after her former husband, but was compelled by my incantations; the second is about her letter, which they take for a confession of magic; then, that she married at the sixtieth year of her age out of lust, and that the marriage-contract was sealed in a country house and not in town — these they brought up in the third and fourth place; the last, and likewise the most envy-laden, accusation was about the dowry. There they strove, with all their strength, to pour out all their venom; there above all they were tortured; and so they said that I extorted a great dowry, at the very beginning of our union, from a woman in love, with the witnesses removed, in a country house. All these things I shall show to be so false, so worthless, so empty, and shall refute them so easily and without any contention, that, so help me, I fear, Maximus, and you who sit in council, lest you should think the accuser was sent down and suborned by me, that, finding the occasion, I might openly extinguish the envy against me. Believe me — which the fact itself will make clear — I have to labour exceedingly hard, lest you should suppose that I cunningly devised so frivolous an accusation rather than that they foolishly undertook it.

68. Now, while I briefly follow out the order of the matter and bring it about that Aemilianus himself, when the matter is known, must needs confess that he was led into envy of me on false grounds and went far astray from the truth, I pray you, as you have done hitherto, or even more closely if you can, attend most diligently to the very source and foundation of this trial. Aemilia Pudentilla, who is now my wife, bore, by a certain Sicinius Amicus, to whom she had previously been married, two sons, Pontianus and Pudens; and these, left orphans in the power of their paternal grandfather — for Amicus had died while his father survived — she reared diligently, with memorable devotion, for about fourteen years, yet not gladly a widow so long in the very flower of her age. But the boys' grandfather strove to betroth her, against her will, to his other son, Sicinius Clarus, and on that account frightened off the other suitors; and besides he threatened that, if she married a stranger, he would leave her sons nothing of their father's goods by his will. When the wise and singularly devoted woman saw this condition obstinately laid down, lest she should in any way harm her sons on that score, she does indeed draw up a marriage-contract with the man she was bidden to marry, with Sicinius Clarus, but in very truth, by various delays, she eludes the marriage until the boys' grandfather yielded to fate, leaving her sons his heirs in such wise that Pontianus, who was the elder, should be guardian to his brother.

69. Freed from that scruple, when she was sought in marriage by men of the first rank, she resolved that she ought not to remain longer in widowhood; for, though she could endure the weariness of solitude, she could not bear the sickness of her body. A woman chastely modest, through so many years of widowhood without fault, without scandal, grown torpid through want of a husband and wounded by the long stagnation of her inward parts, with the inmost recesses of her womb corrupted, she was often, when pains arose, brought to the very brink of life. The physicians, together with the midwives, were agreed that the disease was caused by the lack of marriage, that the malady was growing worse day by day, that the sickness was deepening; while some bloom of her age remained, the disorder must be remedied by marriage. This counsel both others approved, and Aemilianus here above all — the very man who a little while ago, with most confident falsehood, asserted that Pudentilla had never thought of marriage before she was compelled by magical sorceries by me; that I alone had been found to violate, with charms and poisons, the as-it-were virginity of her widowhood. I have often heard it said, and not without reason, that a liar ought to have a good memory; but it did not come into your mind, Aemilianus, that, before I came to Oea, you yourself had even written letters urging her to marry, to her son Pontianus, who was then grown up and living at Rome. Produce the letter — or rather, give it to him himself: let him read it, let him convict himself by his own voice and his own words. Is this your letter? Why have you turned pale? For blush you certainly cannot. Is this your signature? — Read it, I pray you, more loudly, that all may understand how much his tongue is at variance with his hand, and how much less he is at odds with me than with himself.

70. Did you write these things, Aemilianus, which have been read? "That she wishes and ought to marry, I know; but whom she is to choose, I do not know." Quite right of you: you did not know; for Pudentilla, who knew well your hostile malignity, confessed to you only the fact itself, but nothing about the suitor. But you, while you thought she would still be married to your brother Clarus, led on by a false hope, were even an adviser to his son Pontianus too to give his consent. And so, if she had married Clarus, a country fellow and a decrepit old man, you would say she had married long ago of her own accord, without any magic; but since she chose a young man such as you describe, you say she did it under compulsion, and otherwise had always spurned marriage. You did not know, you scoundrel, that your letter on this subject was being kept; you did not know that you would be convicted by your own testimony. Yet that letter, the witness and informer of your purpose, Pudentilla — knowing you to be light and changeable, and no less lying and impudent — chose to keep rather than to send back. As for the matter itself, she herself wrote to her son Pontianus at Rome, and fully set forth the reasons of her resolve as well. She told him all about her health: that there was nothing besides, why she should hold out any longer; that she had sought her grandfather's inheritance by a long widowhood, with contempt of her own well-being, and had increased that same inheritance by the utmost industry; that now, by the will of the gods, he himself was of an age for a wife, and his brother for the manly toga; that they should at last allow her too to relieve her solitude and her sickness; for the rest, that they should fear nothing concerning her devotion and her final disposition: that, such as she had been to them as a widow, such would she be as a wife. I will order a copy of this letter, sent to her son, to be read out.

71. I think it can be plain enough to anyone from these things that Pudentilla was not driven from a stubborn widowhood by my incantations, but, having long since of her own accord been by no means averse from marriage, perhaps preferred me before the rest. And why this choice of so weighty a woman ought to be made a charge against me rather than an honour, I cannot discover; only I wonder that Aemilianus and Rufinus take so ill this judgment of the woman, when those very men who sought Pudentilla in marriage bear it with an even mind that I was preferred to them. And indeed, that she did this, she obeyed her son rather than her own heart. So it was done, nor will Aemilianus be able to deny it. For Pontianus, on receiving his mother's letter, flew at once from Rome, fearing lest, if she had got hold of some greedy husband, she might, as often happens, carry everything off into her husband's house. That anxiety gnawed his mind not a little: all the hopes of riches for him and his brother lay in their mother's resources. Their grandfather had left them a modest sum; their mother possessed four million sesterces, of which she owed a certain amount of money to her sons, received under no written deed, but, as was fair, on her mere good faith. This fear he muttered to himself; he did not dare to oppose her openly, lest he should seem to distrust her.

72. When matters stood thus, between the mother's wooing and the son's fear, by chance or by fate, I arrive, on my way to Alexandria. By Hercules, I would have said "would that it had never happened," did not regard for my wife forbid me. It was the winter of the year. I, worn out by the fatigue of the journey, take to my bed for a good many days at the house of those friends of mine, the Appii, whom I name out of honour and affection. Thither came Pontianus to me; for he had been brought into acquaintance with me not so very long before, many years ago, at Athens, through certain common friends, and afterward joined to me intimately in close companionship. He does everything attentively as regards my honour, anxiously as regards my health, cunningly as regards his love; for indeed he seemed to himself to have found a most suitable husband for his mother, to whom he might, with safe warrant, entrust the whole fortune of the house. And at first, indeed, sounding my will with covert words, since he saw me eager for the road and turned away from the matter of a wife, he begs me to stay at least a little while: that he wished to set out with me; that another winter must be waited out, on account of the heat and the wild beasts of the Syrtes, since my illness had robbed me of this one. He even wins from my Appii, by many entreaties, that I should be moved to his house, to his mother's; that the lodging would be healthier for me; and besides, that I should enjoy more freely from it the prospect of the sea, which is most pleasing to me.

73. All these things, striving with eager zeal, he carries; he commends to me his mother and his brother, this boy here. I help them not a little in our common studies; the familiarity grows greatly. Meanwhile I recover; at the request of friends I discourse somewhat in public; all who were present, filling the basilica, which was the place of the lecture, with a vast throng, among very many other most fitting things, cried out to me with one remarkable voice, begging that I should remain, that I should become a citizen of Oea. Presently, when the audience was dismissed, Pontianus, taking that for his starting-point, set upon me, interprets the consent of the public voice as a divine omen, and discloses that it is his plan, if I do not refuse, to join his mother — at whom very many gape — to me in marriage (since to me alone, he says, he trusts and entrusts everything); that, if I would not take up that burden — since it was no lovely young ward, but the mother of children, of middling looks, that was being offered me — if, weighing these things, I were keeping myself for another match for the sake of beauty and riches, I should be acting neither as a friend nor as a philosopher. It would be too long a speech, if I wished to recount what I answered to the contrary, how long and how often we bandied words between us, with how many and what kind of entreaties he set upon me, and did not let go before he at length prevailed — not but that I had already, by a whole year's constant intercourse, well observed Pudentilla and explored the endowments of her virtues, but inasmuch as, being desirous of travel, I had for a while refused the impediment of marriage. Soon, however, I wished for such a woman no less eagerly than if I had sought her of my own accord. Pontianus had also persuaded his mother to prefer me to all others, and was eager to accomplish this as soon as possible, with incredible zeal. Hardly could we win from him so much delay as this — that first he himself should take a wife, and his brother should take up the use of the manly toga; and then at length that we should be joined.

74. Would, by Hercules, that I could pass over what must next be said without the greatest loss to my case, lest I should seem now to be reproaching with fickleness Pontianus, whose error, when he deprecated it, I freely forgave. For I confess what has been thrown in my teeth: that, after he had taken a wife, he fell away from the faith of our compact, and, his mind suddenly changed, went about to hinder, with equal obstinacy, the very thing he had before hastened with excessive zeal — in short, that, to keep our marriage from coming together, he was ready to suffer anything, to do anything; although all that so foul a change of mind, and the quarrel undertaken against his mother, is not to be charged to his own fault, but to his father-in-law, that Herennius Rufinus yonder, who has left no single man on earth more worthless than himself, or more wicked, or more befouled. In few words, as moderately as I can, I will of necessity describe the man, lest, if I keep wholly silent about him, he should have lost his labour, who stirred up this business against me with his utmost might. For this is the instigator of this little boy, this the author of the accusation, this the hirer of advocates, this the buyer of witnesses, this the little furnace of the whole slander, this the firebrand and the lash of this Aemilianus; and he boasts of it, most intemperately, before everyone, that by his contrivance I have been arraigned as a defendant. And indeed he has, in these things, something to applaud himself for. For he is the cheat of all lawsuits, the deviser of all forgeries, the architect of all pretences, the seed-bed of all evils; and likewise the very den, the haunt, the brothel of lusts and gluttonies; from his earliest years openly notorious for all manner of disgrace; once, in his boyhood, before he was disfigured by that baldness, complaisant in every unspeakable thing to those who unmanned him; soon, in his youth, in dancing pantomimes, plainly boneless and nerveless, but, as I hear, with an untaught and clumsy effeminacy; for it is denied that he had anything of the actor about him except indecency.

75. Even at this age which he is now of — may the gods destroy him! much courtesy must be premised to your ears — his whole house is a pander's house, his whole household defiled: himself a thing of shame, his wife a she-wolf, his sons like them. Day and night, downright, his door is battered by the kicks of the youth in their sport, his windows are loud with serenades, his dining-room is in an uproar with revellers, his bedchamber lies open to adulterers; for no one has any fear of entering, except the man who has brought no price to the husband. Thus the dishonour of his own bed is his revenue. Once he made his money by his own body, now by his wife's, in the common market; with the man himself — and I do not lie — with the man himself, I say, very many strike their bargains for nights with his wife. Now there is that well-known collusion between husband and wife: those who have brought a generous fee to the woman, no one watches them, they depart at their own discretion; those who have come emptier, at a signal given are caught, as if for adulterers, and, as though they had come to learn a lesson, do not depart before they have written something. For what is a wretched man to do, fallen from a rather ample fortune, which yet he had unexpectedly come by through his father's fraud? His father, sunk in debt to very many creditors, preferred money to honour; for when he was dunned on every side with the account-books, and held, as if a madman, by all he met, "Peace!" said he, declares he cannot pay, throws away his golden rings and all the insignia of his rank, makes a composition with his creditors. Yet most of his estate he transfers, by a most cunning fraud, into his wife's name: himself needy, naked, and safe through his own ignominy, he left to this Rufinus — I do not lie — three hundred thousand sesterces to devour; for so much came to him, free and clear, out of his mother's goods, besides what his wife sought for him by her daily dowries. All which, however, in a few years, this glutton so diligently buried in his belly and squandered in revellings of every kind, that you would think he was afraid lest it be said he had anything left from his father's fraud; this just man, and of strict morals, took pains that what had been ill got should ill perish, and nothing was left him of his rather ample fortune except a wretched ambition and a bottomless gullet.

76. As for his wife, now nearly an old woman and worn out, she refuses to feed the whole house any longer by her shame; but his daughter, carried round in vain among the richer young men at her mother's invitation, and even handed over to certain suitors for trial, had perhaps, unless she had chanced upon the easy good nature of Pontianus, still been sitting at home a widow before she was a wife. Pontianus gave her — much against our dissuasion — the false and imaginary title of marriage, not unaware that a little before, when he was about to take her, she had been abandoned, after he had had his fill, by a certain most honourable young man, to whom she had previously been betrothed. So she came to him, the new bride, secure and undaunted, her modesty stripped off, her bloom faded, her bridal veil outworn — a virgin again after a recent divorce, bringing the name of a maiden rather than her intactness. She was carried in a litter of eight bearers; you certainly saw, you who were present, how shameless a scanner of the young men she was, how immoderate a displayer of herself. Who did not recognize the mother's training, when he saw in the girl her painted mouth, her rouged cheeks, her enticing eyes? Her whole dowry had been borrowed from a creditor, to the last farthing, the day before, and indeed a larger one than that exhausted house, full of children, could afford.

77. But this fellow, moderate as he is in substance, immoderate in hope, with avarice and want equally his portion, had already devoured, in empty anticipation, the whole four million of Pudentilla, and thinking that I must therefore be got out of the way, that he might the more easily circumvent the easy good nature of Pontianus and the loneliness of Pudentilla, begins to upbraid his son-in-law for having betrothed his mother to me; he advises him to draw back his foot, as soon as he can, from so great a peril, while it is permitted; to hold his mother's property himself rather than knowingly transmit it to a stranger; and, if he will not do so, the old hand throws a scruple into the love-sick youth, threatens that he will take his daughter away. What more? The simple young man, moreover bridled by the allurements of his new bride, he turns aside from the road at his own pleasure. He goes to his mother, the carrier of Rufinus's words; but, her gravity having been tried in vain, himself rebuked into the bargain for fickleness and inconstancy, he carries back to his father-in-law no soft answer: that to his mother, immovable apart from her most placid disposition, anger too had been added by his expostulation — no slight reinforcement of her steadfastness; that she had answered, in short, that it was not hidden from her that she was being remonstrated with at Rufinus's instigation; and that for that very reason she ought all the more to provide herself with a husband's aid against his desperate avarice.

78. On hearing this, that pimp of his own wife was so exasperated, swelled up with such anger, blazed with such frenzy, that against a most holy and most modest woman, in the presence of her own son, he spoke things worthy of his bedchamber, cried out that she was a wanton, that I was a magician and a poisoner, in the hearing of many (whom, if you will, I shall name): that he would bring death upon me with his own hand. Hardly, by Hercules, can I govern my anger; a huge indignation rises in my mind. You, you most effeminate of men, with your hand threaten death to any man? But with what hand, pray? That of Philomela, or Medea, or Clytemnestra? And yet, when you dance these — such is the softness of your soul, such your dread of steel — you dance them without a sword. But, not to digress too far from my order: Pudentilla, after she sees that her son, against expectation, has been perverted to the opposite of her own resolve, set out for the country and wrote to him, by way of rebuke, that most notorious letter, in which, as those men kept saying, she confessed that she had been led into love and madness by my magic; which letter, however, in the presence of Pontianus's clerk and with Aemilianus writing on the other side, we copied out, under attestation, the day before yesterday, by your command, Maximus; and in it everything is found, contrary to the proclamation of those men, in my favour.

79. And yet, even if she had called me a magician more roundly, she might be thought to have wished, by way of excuse to her son, rather to allege my compulsion than her own will. Or was Phaedra alone in inventing a false letter about love, and is not this an art familiar to all women — that, when they have begun to want anything of the kind, they prefer to seem compelled? But even if she really thought so in her heart, that I was a magician, am I therefore to be held a magician, because Pudentilla wrote this? You, with so many arguments, so many witnesses, with so long a speech, do not prove me a magician: would she prove it with a single word? And how much more weight, pray, is to be given to what is sworn to in a court than to what is written in a letter? Why do you not convict me by my own deeds, rather than by another's words? Otherwise, by the same road, many men will be arraigned for any crime you please, if whatever a man has written in his letter, out of love or hatred for someone, is to hold good. "Pudentilla wrote that you were a magician: therefore you are a magician." What if she had written that I was a consul: should I be a consul? What, if a painter, if a physician, what, finally, if innocent? Would you think me any of these, for the reason that she had said it? Nothing of the kind, of course. And yet it is most unjust to put faith, in the worse case, in one to whom you would not put it in the better — that her letter has power to ruin, but no power to save. "But," he says, "she was out of her mind, she loved you to distraction." I grant it for the moment. Are all those who are loved, then, magicians, if perchance the one who loves writes this? I believe rather, now, that Pudentilla at that time did not love me, since she wrote abroad what was plainly going to harm me.

80. Finally, which do you wish — that she was sane, or insane, when she wrote? You will say sane? Then she had suffered nothing from magic arts. You will answer insane? Then she did not know what she wrote, and therefore no faith is to be put in her; nay rather, if she had been insane, she would not have known that she was insane. For just as he acts absurdly who says that he is silent — since by saying so in that very place he does not keep silent, and by the very profession weakens what he professes — so this is even more self-contradictory: "I am insane," which is not true unless he says it knowingly; but he is sane who knows what insanity is, since insanity cannot know itself, any more than blindness can see itself. Therefore Pudentilla was of sound mind, if she did not think herself of sound mind. I could, if I wished, say more, but I let logic go. I will read the letter itself, which cries out something far different, and which seems, as it were, deliberately prepared and fitted for this trial. Take it, you, and read, until I interrupt. — Hold back a little while what follows; for we have come to a turning-point of the matter. For so far, Maximus, as far as I at least have observed, nowhere has the woman named magic, but she has gone over the same order which I went over a little before: of her long widowhood, of the remedy for her health, of her wish to marry, of my praises, which she had learned from Pontianus, of his own urging that she should marry me above all.

81. Thus far it has been read. There remains that part of the letter which, written likewise in my favour, turns its horns against my very self; which, sent with diligence to drive the charge of magic from me, by a memorable encomium of Rufinus has changed sides, and of its own accord sought to fix upon me the contrary opinion of certain people of Oea, as of a magician. Many things, Maximus, you have heard by report, more you have learned by reading, not a few you have ascertained by experience: but cunning so insidious, so compounded of marvellous villainy, you will deny that you ever came to know. What Palamedes, what Sisyphus, what Eurybates, finally, or Phrynondas could have devised the like? All those whom I have named, and any others besides who are memorable for guile, if they be set against this one piece of Rufinus's deceit, will plainly seem mere clowns and buffoons. O wonderful contrivance! O subtlety worthy of the prison and the rack! Who would believe it could be brought about that what had been a defence, the same — the same letters remaining — should be turned into an accusation? It is, by Hercules, incredible. But how this incredible thing was done, I will prove.

82. There was a mother's rebuke to her son, because he, taking it from Rufinus's opinion, now kept calling a magician me, such a man as she had proclaimed me to him. The very words ran in this manner: "Apuleius is a magician, and I have been bewitched by him and am in love. Come, then, to me, while I am still in my right mind." These very words, which I have inserted in Greek, Rufinus, alone excerpting them and sundered from their context, carried round as if it were the woman's confession, and, leading the weeping Pontianus through the forum, showed them to the crowd, offered the woman's very letter to be read just so far as I have said, and concealed the rest written above and below; he kept saying they were too shameful to be shown: it was enough that the woman's confession of magic should be known. What more? It seemed plausible to everyone; the very things that had been written to clear me roused against me a monstrous odium among the ignorant. This filthy fellow ranged through the middle of the forum, raving like a Bacchanal, again and again opening the letter and crying aloud: "Apuleius is a magician; she herself says what she feels and suffers; what more do you want?" There was no one to take my part and to answer thus: "Give us the whole letter, if you please; let me look at it all, let me read it through from beginning to end. There are many things which, brought forward alone, can seem liable to slander. Anyone's speech can be misrepresented, if those things which are linked to what went before are cheated of their beginning, if certain things are suppressed at pleasure out of the order of the writing, if things said for pretence are read with the delivery of one asserting rather than of one reproaching." These things, and the like of them, might then deservedly have been said; the very order of the letter shows it.

83. But you, Aemilianus, call to mind whether you copied out under attestation, along with me, these words too: "For, wishing to marry for the reasons I have stated, you yourself persuaded me to choose this man before all others, admiring the man and being eager to make him your own through me. But now, since malicious accusers are talking you over, suddenly Apuleius has become a magician, and I have been bewitched by him and am in love. Come, then, to me, while I am still in my right mind." I beseech you, Maximus: if letters, just as some are called vowels, had also a voice of their own; if words, as the poets say, flew abroad on wings — would not, the moment Rufinus in bad faith excerpted that letter, read a few words, knowingly kept silent about many and better ones, would not then the rest of the letters have cried out that they were being wickedly held back, would not the suppressed words have flown out of Rufinus's hands into the open, have filled the whole forum with their tumult: that they too had been sent by Pudentilla, that they too had been charged with things to say; that to a wicked and impious man, trying to commit a forgery through another's letter, they would not give ear, but would rather be heard themselves; that Apuleius had not been accused of magic by Pudentilla, but acquitted, with Rufinus for accuser? All which, even if they were not said then, yet now, when they are of more profit, appear clearer than the light. Your arts lie open, Rufinus, your frauds gape wide, the lie is uncovered: the truth, once perverted, now bears itself forth, and slander plunges, as into a deep pit.

84. You appealed to the letters of Pudentilla: by the letters I win; and if you wish to hear also their very last clause, I will not grudge it. Say, you, with what words the woman finished her letter — the bewitched, the senseless, the mad, the love-sick woman: "I am neither bewitched nor in love. I am escaping my destiny." Do you want still more? Pudentilla cries out against you, and vindicates her own sanity from your slanders by a kind of public proclamation; and the reason, or the necessity, of her marrying she ascribes to fate, from which magic is far removed, or rather wholly abolished. For what force is left to enchantments and poisons, if fate, like a most violent torrent, can neither be held back nor driven on? Therefore, by this sentence of hers, Pudentilla has denied not only that I am a magician, but that magic exists at all. It is well that Pontianus, after his custom, preserved his mother's letters whole; it is well that the haste of the trial forestalled you, lest you should make any change in these letters at your leisure. This, Maximus, is the benefit of you and of your foresight, that, having from the beginning understood the slanders, lest they should be strengthened by time, you precipitated them, and, granting no delay, hamstrung them. Suppose now that a mother had confessed to her son, in a secret letter, something about love, as is wont. Was it right, Rufinus — I do not say pious, but even merely humane — to publish those letters, and to publish them above all by the proclamation of her son? But am I not foolish, who demand that you preserve another's modesty, you who have lost your own?

85. But why do I complain of things past, when present things are no less bitter? To this point has that wretched boy been perverted by you, that he reads out his mother's letters, which he thinks amatory, before a proconsular tribunal, in the presence of that most holy man Claudius Maximus; that before these statues of the emperor Pius a son reproaches his mother with shameful debaucheries and throws her loves in her teeth. Who is so mild that he would not grow hot with anger? Do you, you basest of men, search out your parent's heart in such matters, watch her eyes, count her sighs, explore her affections, intercept her letters, convict her of love? Do you inquire what she does in her bedchamber, that your mother may be reckoned — I do not say a wanton, but not even a woman at all? Do you think of nothing in her but the single reverence due to a parent? O unhappy your womb, Pudentilla! O barrenness better than children! O ill-fated ten months! O thankless fourteen years of widowhood! The viper, as I hear, gnawing through its mother's womb, creeps forth into the light, and so is born by parricide: but to you, while you live and look on, harsher bites are offered by a son now grown up. Your silence is torn, your modesty is plucked, your breast is pierced, your inmost vitals are dragged forth. Are these the thanks, good son, that you repay your mother — for the life she gave, for the inheritance she acquired, for the long fourteen years of nurture? In these disciplines did your uncle school you, that, if you should learn for certain your sons would be like you, you would not dare to take a wife? There is a verse of the poet, not unknown: "I hate little boys of precocious wisdom." But a boy precocious in malice, who would not turn from and hate, when he sees, like a monster, one robust in crime before he is robust in years, harmful before he is powerful, with green boyhood, with hoary malice? Or rather, all the more noxious is this, that he is pernicious with impunity, and, not yet ripe for punishment, is already ripe for injury — injury, do I say? nay rather, for a crime against a parent, unspeakable, monstrous, intolerable.

86. The Athenians, indeed, for the common right of humanity, out of the captured letters of Philip of Macedon, their enemy, when each was being read in public, forbade one letter to be read out, which had been written to his wife Olympias; they spared the enemy rather than divulge a husband's secret, judging that the common law of right ought to be preferred to their own vengeance. Such were enemies toward an enemy: what kind of son are you toward a mother! You see how close are the things I compare. Yet you, a son, read your mother's letters, written about love, as you say, in this assembly — in which, if you were bidden to read some too-wanton poet, you would assuredly not dare; some shame, at least, would hold you back. Nay, you would never have touched your mother's letters, if you had touched any other letters at all. But how you dared to give to be read your own letter — which, written too irreverently, too insultingly and foully about your mother, while you were still being nursed in her bosom, you had sent secretly to Pontianus, no doubt that you might not have sinned only once, and that your good deed might be taken in by his gaze! Wretch, you do not understand that your uncle suffered this to be done in order to clear himself before men, if from your letter it should be known that you, even before you came over to him, even while you were fawning on your mother, were nevertheless already a sly fox and an impious one.

87. For the rest, I cannot bring myself to think Aemilianus so foolish as to suppose that the letters of a boy, and of one who is at the same time my accuser, will do me any harm. There was also that fabricated letter, neither written in my hand nor plausibly forged, by which they wished it to seem that the woman had been solicited by me with blandishments. Why should I use blandishments, if I trusted in magic? And by what way did the letter come to them — a letter sent, of course, to Pudentilla through some trusty person, as is wont to be done with care in such a matter? Why, besides, should I write in such faulty words, in so barbarous a style — I, whom those same men say is by no means unskilled in the Greek tongue? Why, again, should I court her with blandishments so absurd and so tavern-like — I, whom those same men say sport wittily enough in amatory verses? It is so, assuredly; it is plain to anyone: this man, who could not read Pudentilla's somewhat-too-Greek letter, read this one the more easily as his own, and commended it the more aptly. But I shall have said enough about the letters, if I add this one thing: that Pudentilla, who had written, by way of dissimulation and ridicule, "Come, then, while I am still in my right mind," after this letter summoned her sons and her daughter-in-law to her, and lived with them for about these two months. Let this pious son say what, in that time, he saw his mother do or say amiss through insanity; let him deny that she subscribed most shrewdly the accounts of the bailiffs and shepherds and grooms; let him deny that his brother Pontianus was gravely warned by her to beware of the snares of Rufinus; let him deny that he was truly rebuked because he had carried about the letter she had sent him among the crowd, and yet had not read it in good faith; let him deny that, after these things which I have mentioned, his mother married me at a country house, at a place agreed upon long before. For it had so pleased us, that we should rather be joined at a suburban villa, lest the citizens should again flock together for the doles, since not long before Pudentilla had paid out fifty thousand sesterces of her own to the people, on the day that Pontianus took a wife and this little boy was wrapped in the toga; and besides, that we might dispense with the many banquets and vexations which new husbands have, after custom, to undergo.

88. There you have, Aemilianus, the whole reason why the marriage-contract between me and Pudentilla was sealed not in the town, but at a suburban villa: lest fifty thousand sesterces should have to be lavished again, and lest we should have to dine with you or at your house. Is the reason adequate? Yet I wonder that you so shrink from a country house, you who for the most part live in the country. The Julian law on the marriages of the orders nowhere forbids in this fashion: "Thou shalt not take a wife at a country house"; nay, if you would have the truth, a wife is taken with much better auspices for offspring at a country house than in the town, on fertile soil rather than in a barren place, on the turf of the field rather than on the flag-stones of the forum. A woman about to be a mother, let her marry in the very lap of the mother, in the standing corn, upon the fruitful clod, or let her lie a bride beneath the elm, in the very bosom of mother Earth, among the offshoots of the grasses and the layered shoots of the vines and the buds of the trees. There too that most celebrated verse in the comedies aptly fits: "for the ploughing of lawful children, for the sowing." To the ancestors of the Romans also — the Quintii and the Serrani and many others like them — not only wives, but even consulships and dictatorships were offered in the fields. I will check myself in a theme so prolix, lest I do you a favour, if I should praise the country house.

89. But as to the age of Pudentilla, about which after these things you lied confidently enough, so that you said that she had married even at sixty years of age — about that I will answer you in few words; for there is no need, in a matter so plain, to dispute at length. Her father, after the manner of others, registered her at her birth as a daughter born to him. His records are kept partly in the public record-office, partly at home, and they are now thrust before your face. Hand these tablets, you, to Aemilianus: let him look at the thread, let him recognize the seals that are stamped upon it, let him read the consuls, let him reckon up the years which he was assigning, as sixty, to the woman. Let him prove fifty-five: then he has lied by five years. That is too little; I will deal more liberally — for he himself has bestowed many years upon Pudentilla, so I will give him back ten in turn: Mezentius has wandered along with Ulysses. Let him show the woman to be at least fifty years old. What more? That I may deal with the false-claimant, I will make twice the double of a five-year span, and at one stroke take off twenty years. Bid the consuls be reckoned, Maximus: unless I am mistaken, you will find that Pudentilla's age is now running on not much beyond the fortieth year. O bold and excessive falsehood, O lie to be punished with twenty years of exile! You lie by half as much again, Aemilianus, you dare a falsehood of one and a half times the truth. If you had said thirty years for ten, you might have seemed to err by the gesture of computation, by laying on the fingers which you ought to have curled into a circle. But when forty — which is more easily signified than the rest by the palm held out — when you increase these forty by half, you cannot have erred by the gesture of the fingers, unless perhaps, supposing Pudentilla to be thirty, you have counted the two consuls of each year.

90. These things I let pass. I come now to the very root of the accusation, to the very motive of the sorcery. Let Aemilianus and Rufinus answer: for what gain — even if I were the greatest of magicians — should I have enticed Pudentilla to marriage by charms and poisons? And I know that very many defendants, arraigned for some crime, if any motives have been proved to exist, have nevertheless defended themselves abundantly by this one plea — that their life shrinks far from crimes of this kind, and that it ought not to tell against them that there seem to have been certain inducements to the misdeed; for not all things that could have been done are to be held as done, and the changing turns of circumstance fall out variously: that the sure index of every man is his own mind; that he who has always, with the same disposition, been disposed toward virtue or toward malice, gives a firm argument for receiving or rejecting a charge. These things, although I could deservedly say them, yet I forgive you, and I do not think it enough for myself if I have abundantly cleared myself of all you have alleged, unless I have nowhere allowed even the slightest suspicion of magic to stand. Reckon with yourselves with what confidence in my innocence, and with what contempt of you, I act: if one motive, even the least, shall be found, why I should have sought the marriage of Pudentilla for some advantage of my own; if you prove any gain, however modest, then let me be that Carmendas, or Damigeron, or Moses, or Iannes, or Apollobex, or Dardanus himself, or whoever else after Zoroaster and Hostanes has been famous among the magicians.

91. See, I pray you, Maximus, what an uproar they have raised, because I have run over by name a few of the magicians. What am I to do with men so rude, so barbarous? Shall I teach them again that I have read these names, and many more besides, in the public libraries, among the most renowned writers? Or shall I argue that it is one thing to be acquainted with names, another to share in the art itself; and that the apparatus of learning and the memory of erudition ought not to be held a confession of crime? Or, what is far better, relying on your learning, Claudius Maximus, and on your perfect erudition, shall I scorn to answer the foolish and the unpolished on these points? Yes, I will do this rather: what they may think, I will count of no value; the thing I set out to do, I will go on to argue: that I had no motive for enticing Pudentilla to marriage by poisons. The woman's looks and age they themselves, of their own accord, disparaged, and laid it to my fault that, out of avarice, I had coveted such a wife, and indeed at our first meeting had seized a great and rich dowry. As to these things, Maximus, it is not my design to weary you with a long speech; no words are needed, since the very tablets speak far more eloquently, in which you find everything done at present and provided for the future, contrary to what those men, out of their rapacity, conjectured of me too: first of all, a modest dowry from a most wealthy woman, and that not given, but only entrusted on credit; and besides these things, that the union was made on this condition — that, if she should depart this life with no children begotten by me, the whole dowry should remain with her sons Pontianus and Pudens; but if she should die leaving one son or daughter surviving, then half the dowry should fall to the later child, the remainder to the elder ones.

92. These things, as I say, I will prove by the tablets themselves. Perhaps not even thus will Aemilianus believe that only three hundred thousand sesterces were set down, and the recovery of them given by compact to Pudentilla's sons. Take, if you please, these tablets with your own hands, give them to your instigator Rufinus: let him read, let him be ashamed of his swollen spirit and his ostentatious beggary; since he himself, needy and naked, dowered his daughter with four hundred thousand sesterces borrowed from a creditor, while Pudentilla, a wealthy woman, was content with a dowry of three hundred thousand, and has a husband who, scorning many and often vast dowries that were offered, was content with the empty name of so small a dowry, and reckons nothing but his wife, who puts all his furniture and all his riches in the concord of marriage and in mutual love. And yet who of all men, even slightly skilled in affairs, would dare to find fault if a widow, of middling looks but not of middling age, wishing to marry, had enticed by a long dowry and an easy condition a young man not to be regretted in body or mind or fortune? A beautiful maiden, even if she be downright poor, is yet abundantly dowered; for she brings to her husband a fresh disposition of soul, the grace of beauty, the first beginnings of bloom. The very recommendation of virginity is rightly and deservedly most acceptable to all husbands; for whatever else you have received as dowry, you can, when you please — so as not to be bound by the benefit — give back, just as you received it: repay the money, restore the slaves, move out of the house, withdraw from the estates: only virginity, once received, cannot be returned; it alone remains with the husband of the dowry-goods. But a widow, such as she came to the marriage, such she departs at the divorce; she brings nothing irrecoverable, but comes already deflowered by another, by no means apt to learn what you wish, no less suspicious of her new home than she is herself already to be suspected on account of that one divorce — whether she lost her husband by death, and so is a woman of ill omen and of unlucky marriage, by no means to be desired, or has parted by repudiation, a woman having either fault, who either was so intolerable as to be repudiated, or so insolent as to repudiate. For these and other reasons widows entice their suitors with an augmented dowry. Which Pudentilla too would have done in the case of another husband, had she not found a philosopher who scorned the dowry.

93. Come now: if I had coveted the woman for avarice's sake, what would have been more useful to me, for the possession of her house, than to sow discord between mother and sons, to alienate from her heart the affection of her children, that I might the more freely and closely possess the desolate woman alone? Was this the act of a robber — which you feign me to be? No, I was rather the author, the reconciler, the fosterer of quiet and concord and devotion; and not only did I sow no new hatreds, but I rooted out the old ones to their foundation. I urged my wife — whose whole resources, as those men say, I had already swallowed up — I urged her, I say, and at last persuaded her, that, when her sons demanded back their own money, of which I spoke above, she should restore that money without delay, in estates valued cheaply, and at whatever price they themselves wished; and besides, that out of her own estate she should give them the most fruitful fields and a great house richly furnished and a great quantity of wheat and barley and wine and oil and the other fruits, and slaves too, not fewer than four hundred, and cattle, neither few nor of mean value — that she might both make them secure as to that portion which she had assigned, and entice them, by hope, to the rest of the inheritance. These things, then, I wrung from an unwilling Pudentilla — for she will suffer me to tell it as the matter was — I extorted them from her, unwilling and angry, by mighty entreaties; I reconciled the mother to her sons, and enriched my stepsons, by this first benefit of a stepfather, with a great sum of money.

94. This was known to the whole city. All cursed Rufinus and extolled me with praises. Pontianus had come to us, before she completed that donation, together with that unlike brother of his, and, falling at our feet, had begged pardon and forgetfulness of all that was past, weeping and kissing our hands and saying that he repented of having listened to Rufinus and the like. He begs afterward, as a suppliant, that I would clear him also to Lollianus Avitus, a most distinguished man, to whom not long before he had been commended by me on the first trial of his oratory; for he had learned that, a few days before, I had written to him a full account of everything as it had happened. This too he obtains from me. And so, having received the letter, he sets out for Carthage, where Lollianus Avitus, his consulship now nearly run out, was awaiting you, Maximus. He, having read my letter, with his eminent humanity, congratulated Pontianus on having so quickly corrected his error, and wrote back to me by him a letter — good gods, with what learning, with what grace, with what charm and at the same time pleasantness of words, downright as a good man skilled in speaking. I know, Maximus, that you will gladly hear his letter; and indeed, if I read it aloud, I will pronounce it with my own voice. Hand over, you, the letters of Avitus, that what have always been an ornament to me may now be also a safeguard. But you may let the water-clock run on; for the letters of that excellent man I long to read over and over, three and four times, at whatever cost of time.

95. I am not unaware that, after these letters of Avitus, I ought to have brought my speech to a close. For what more wealthy eulogist, what more holy witness of my life, what more eloquent advocate, finally, could I produce? Many eloquent men of the Roman name I have diligently come to know in my life, but I have admired none equally. There is no one today, so far as my opinion goes, of any reputation or hope in eloquence, who would not far rather be Avitus, if, with envy set aside, he were willing to compare himself with him; for all the virtues of speaking, well-nigh opposite to each other, meet together in that man. Whatever speech Avitus has built, it will be so perfectly finished on every side that in it neither would Cato miss weight, nor Laelius smoothness, nor Gracchus impetuosity, nor Caesar fire, nor Hortensius arrangement, nor Calvus shrewdness, nor Sallust thrift, nor Cicero richness: in short — not to go through them all — if you hear Avitus, you would wish nothing added, nothing taken away, nor yet anything changed. I see, Maximus, how kindly you listen to what you recognize in your friend Avitus. Your courtesy invited me to say even these few things of him. But I will not so far indulge your good will as to allow myself, now almost wearied in a cause inclining downright toward its end, to begin only now upon his outstanding virtues; rather I will keep them for unspent strength and a free hour.

96. For now, much against my will, my speech must roll back from the commemoration of so great a man to those plagues. Do you dare, then, Aemilianus, to compare yourself with Avitus? Will you assail with the charge of magic and sorcery the man whom he calls a good man, the disposition of whose mind he praises so fully in his letter? Or ought you to grieve more that I invaded the house of Pudentilla and plundered her goods than Pontianus would have grieved — Pontianus, who, for the quarrels that arose between us over a few days, at your instigation, of course, made me satisfaction even in my absence before Avitus, who gave me thanks before so great a man? Suppose that I had read the proceedings before Avitus, not his own letter. What could you, or anyone, accuse in that business? Pontianus himself credited to my gift what he had received as a donation from his mother; Pontianus rejoiced with his inmost affections that I had fallen to him as a stepfather. Would that he had returned safe from Carthage! Or, since it had been so decreed for him by fate, would that you, Rufinus, had not hindered his last disposition. What thanks he would have given me, either to my face or at least in his will! Yet the letters which he sent ahead to me from Carthage, or even already on his way, from the road — while still in health, and already sick — full of honour, full of love, allow, I pray you, Maximus, to be read a little while, that his brother, my accuser, may know how, in everything inferior, he runs the course of his life beside his brother, a man of excellent memory.

97. Have you heard the titles which your brother Pontianus bestowed on me — calling me his parent, his lord, his master, both often at other times and especially at the very last period of his life, after . . . ? Your matching letters too I would bring forth, if I thought even a little delay worth so much. Rather I would wish to bring forward that recent will of your brother, which, though unfinished, yet most dutifully and most honourably makes mention of me. But that will Rufinus suffered neither to be drawn up nor to be completed, out of shame at the lost inheritance, which, as the price of the few months in which he was Pontianus's father-in-law, he had reckoned at a great rate of nights. Besides, he had consulted I know not what Chaldaeans, at what gain he should bestow his daughter, who — as I hear (and would they had not answered it truly) — replied first, that her husband would die within a few months; for the rest, about the inheritance, as is wont, they made up to the wish of the consulter. But, as the gods willed, like a blind beast he gaped in vain. For Pontianus, having found out the daughter of Rufinus to be of ill repute, not only did not leave her his heir, but did not even bestow on her an honourable legacy; indeed he ordered linens of about two hundred denarii to be assigned to her, by way of insult, that it might be understood that he had reckoned her in anger rather than passed her over in forgetfulness. He wrote as heirs, both in this will and in the former one which was read, his mother together with his brother; to whom, as you see, a boy still in years, Rufinus is applying that same machine of his daughter, and is thrusting some woman much older in years, the very lately wife of his brother, upon and beneath the wretched boy.

98. But he, captured and possessed by the blandishments of the harlot girl and the enticements of her pander of a father, the moment his brother gave up the ghost, left his mother and went over to his uncle, that the more easily, with us removed, the things begun might be accomplished; for Aemilianus favours Rufinus and desires the harvest. — Ha, you rightly remind me: the good uncle too tempers and fosters his own hope in this boy, knowing that of a child who dies intestate he will be the legal heir rather than the just one. I would not, by Hercules, that this had come from me; it was not part of my moderation to break openly the silent suspicions of all; you do wrong, who have prompted it. To be plain, indeed, if you would have the truth, many wonder, Aemilianus, at this so sudden affection of yours toward that boy, after his brother Pontianus is dead, when before you were so unknown to him that often you did not even recognize your brother's son by sight when you met him. But now you show yourself so indulgent to him, and so corrupt him with indulgence, you oppose him in nothing, that by these very things you give credit to the more suspicious. We received him unmanly: you have made him a man at once. While he was ruled by us, he went to his masters: from them he now flees in great flight into the cookshop, spurns serious friends, and, with the basest young men, among harlots and wine-cups, a boy of this age plies his banqueting. He himself is the ruler of your house, himself the master of the household, himself the master of the feast; at the gladiatorial school too a frequent visitor, he is taught the names of the gladiators and their fights and wounds — by the trainer himself, indeed, quite as becomes an honourable boy. He never speaks except Punic, and what he still keeps of Greek from his mother; for to speak Latin he neither will nor can. You heard, Maximus, a little while ago — O abomination! — my stepson, the brother of Pontianus, that eloquent young man, scarcely stammering out single syllables, when you asked him whether their mother had given them what I said had been given through my exertions.

99. I call you, then, to witness, Claudius Maximus, and you who sit in council, and you too who stand with me at the tribunal, that these losses and disgraces of his character are to be charged to this uncle here and to that candidate of a father-in-law; and that henceforth I shall count it well that such a stepson has shaken the yoke of my care from his neck, and that I shall not hereafter make supplication to his mother on his behalf. For — what I had very nearly forgotten — very lately, when Pudentilla, after the death of her son Pontianus, was making her will in ill health, I strove long against her, that she should not disinherit this boy on account of so many notable insults, so many injuries; that she should cancel a most grievous clause already, by Hercules, wholly written out, I begged with earnest entreaties; finally, that, if I should not prevail, I would part from her, I threatened: that she would grant me this favour, overcome a bad son by a benefit, free me from all envy. Nor did I desist before she did so. I am sorry that I have removed this scruple from Aemilianus, that I have disclosed to him a thing so unexpected. Behold, I pray you, Maximus, how, on hearing this, he was suddenly struck dumb, how he cast his eyes to the ground; for he had thought far otherwise, and not without reason: he knew the woman to be infected with her son's insults and bound to me by my services. Of me too there was something for him to fear: anyone, even though he scorned the inheritance as much as I, would yet not have refused to be avenged on so undutiful a stepson. This anxiety especially goaded them to accuse me: they falsely conjectured, out of their own avarice, that the whole inheritance had been left to me. I free you, as to the past, from that fear. For neither the occasion of inheritance nor of revenge could move my mind from its place. I fought with an angry mother on behalf of a bad stepson, a stepfather, as a father for the best of sons against a stepmother; nor was it enough, unless I restrained my good wife's lavish liberality toward me, far beyond what was fair.

100. Hand over, you, the will now made by the mother against her unfriendly son, with me — whom these men call a robber — dictating each single word along with entreaties. Bid these tablets be broken open, Maximus: you will find the son the heir, but to me indeed I know not what slight thing left for honour's sake, lest, if anything in the way of mortality should befall him, I, the husband, should not have my name in my wife's tablets. Take that will of your mother — undutiful, indeed, this one truly; and why not? — in which she disinherited a most obedient husband, and wrote as heir a most hostile son; nay rather, not a son, but the hopes of Aemilianus and the marriage of Rufinus, but that drunken company, your parasites. Take it, I say, best of sons, and, laying aside your mother's amatory letters a little while, read the will rather: if she wrote anything as one insane, you will find it here, and indeed at the very beginning: "Let Sicinius Pudens, my son, be my heir." I confess, whoever reads this will think her insane. This your son, heir — who, at the very funeral of his brother, with a band of most abandoned young men called in, wished to shut you out of the house which you yourself had given; who took it grievously and bitterly that you had been left coheir to him by his brother; who at once deserted you, with your grief and mourning, and fled to Rufinus and Aemilianus from your bosom; who afterward spoke very many insults to your face and, with his uncle aiding, committed them; who bandied your name about before the tribunals; who tried to disgrace your modesty publicly by your own letters; who arraigned on a capital charge your husband, whom you had chosen, whom, as he himself objected, you loved to distraction? Open, I pray you, good boy, open the will: so you will more easily prove your mother's insanity. Why do you refuse, why do you decline, now that you have repelled your anxiety about your mother's inheritance? But I, these tablets,

101. Maximus, here on the very spot, before your feet, I throw down, and I call you to witness that henceforth I shall hold it of less concern what Pudentilla writes in her will. Let him himself now, as he pleases, entreat his mother for the rest: for me, he has left no room to plead further on his behalf. Let him himself now — being his own master, and a man who dictates most bitter letters to his mother — soften her anger; he who could plead a cause to the end will be able to plead a prayer to good effect. For me it is long since enough, if I have not only most fully dissolved the charges brought against me, but have even rooted up, to its foundation, the very root of this trial — that is, the envy of inheritance sought. This too, lest I pass over any of the whole, before I close, I will refute as falsely alleged. You said that I had bought, in my own name, a most beautiful estate with a great sum of the woman's money. I say it was a tiny little inheritance of sixty thousand sesterces; that, moreover, not I, but Pudentilla bought it in her own name; that Pudentilla's name is in the tablets; that the tax for that little field was paid in Pudentilla's name. The public quaestor is present, to whom it was paid, Corvinius Celer, a man of distinction; the woman's guardian and authorizer is here too, a man most grave and most holy, to be named by me with every honour, Cassius Longinus. Ask, Maximus, of what purchase he was the authorizer, at what trifling price the wealthy woman bought her little field. Is it as I said? Is my name written in anywhere in this purchase? Is the very price of the little inheritance a matter of envy? Was even this, at least, bestowed on me?

102. What else is there, Aemilianus, that I have not refuted with you for judge? What reward of my magic have you found? Why, then, should I bend Pudentilla's mind by poisons? That I might take what advantage from her? That she should name me a modest dowry rather than an ample one? O glorious charms! Or that she should bind back that dowry to her sons rather than leave it with me? What can be added to this magic? Or that, at my urging, she should give away most of her estate to her sons — she who, before me as husband, had bestowed nothing on them — and impart nothing whatever to me? O grievous sorcery — shall I call it? — or thankless benefit. Or that, in the will she was writing in anger against her son, she should leave as heir the son with whom she was offended, rather than me, to whom she was bound? This indeed I obtained with difficulty, by many enchantments. Suppose that you were pleading your cause not before Claudius Maximus, a man fair and tenacious of justice, but set up some other depraved and savage judge, a favourer of accusations, eager to condemn: give him something to go on, supply even the least plausible occasion of pronouncing in your favour; at least invent something, devise what you might answer to the man who asked you this. And since every attempt must be preceded by some motive, answer, you who say that Apuleius assailed Pudentilla's mind with magic enticements: what did he seek from her, why did he do it? Had he desired her beauty? You deny it. Had he at least coveted her riches? The dowry-tablets deny it, the donation-tablets deny it, the will-tablets deny it — in which it is shown that he not only did not greedily reach after, but even harshly repelled, the liberality of his own wife. What other motive is there, then? Why have you fallen dumb? Why are you silent? Where is that savage opening of your indictment, framed in the name of my stepson:

103. "This man, my lord Maximus, did I set about making a defendant before you?" Why, then, do you not add: a defendant who is a teacher, a defendant who is a stepfather, a defendant who is an intercessor? But what next? "Of very many sorceries, and of the most manifest." Give me one out of the many; give me a doubtful one, or at least an obscure one, out of the most manifest. For the rest, to these things which you have objected, count whether I do not answer in a couple of words each. You polish your teeth: pardon a man his cleanliness. You look into mirrors: a philosopher ought to. You make verses: it is allowed to be done. You investigate fishes: Aristotle teaches it. You consecrate wood: Plato counsels it. You take a wife: the laws command it. She is older in years than you: it commonly happens. You went after gain: take the dowry-deed, recall the donation, read the will. And if I have beaten back all these things to the full, if I have refuted all the slanders, if in all things — not only the charges, but even the insults — I keep myself far from blame; if the honour of philosophy, which is dearer to me than my own safety, I have nowhere diminished, but rather, on the contrary, have everywhere held it fast with full sail: if these things, as I say, are so, then I can with an untroubled mind reverence your good opinion rather than dread your power, since I judge it less grievous and less to be feared to be condemned by a proconsul than, if I were disapproved by so good and so faultless a man. I have spoken.