If you only would put up with the country and be sensible, and do as the rest of us do, my dear Thrasonides, you would offer ivy and laurel and myrtle and flowers to the gods at the proper time; and to us, your parents, you would give wheat and wine and a milk-pail full of the new goat’s-milk.  But as things are, you despise the country and farming, and are fond only of the helmet-plumes and the shield, just as if you were an Acarnanian or a Malian soldier.  Don’t keep on in this way, my son; but come back to us and take up this peaceful life of ours again (for farming is perfectly safe and free from any danger, and doesn’t require bands of soldiers and strategy and squadrons), and be the stay of our old age, preferring a safe life to a risky one.

From the ‘Epistolae,’ iii. 16.

FROM A CURIOUS YOUTH

PHILOCOMUS TO THESTYLUS

Since I have never yet been to town, and really don’t know at all what the thing is that they call a city, I am awfully anxious to see this strange sight,—­men living all in one place,—­and to learn about the other points in which a city differs from the country.  Consequently, if you have any reason for going to town, do come and take me with you.  As a matter of fact, I am sure there are lots of things I ought to know, now that my beard is beginning to sprout; and who is so able to show me the city as yourself, who are all the time going back and forth to the town?

From the ‘Epistolae’ iii. 31.

FROM A PROFESSIONAL DINER-OUT

CAPNOSPHRANTES TO ARISTOMACHUS

I should like to ask my evil genius, who drew me by lot as his own particular charge, why he is so malignant and so cruel as to keep me in everlasting poverty; for if no one happens to invite me to dinner I have to live on greens, and to eat acorns and to fill my stomach with water from the hydrant.  Now, as long as my body was able to put up with this sort of thing, and my time of life was such as made it proper for me to bear it, I could get along with them fairly well; but now that my hair is growing gray, and the only outlook I have is in the direction of old age, what on earth am I going to do?  I shall really have to get a rope and hang myself unless my luck changes.  However, even if fortune remains as it is, I shan’t string myself up before I have at least one square meal; for before very long, the wedding of Charitus and Leocritis, which is going to be a famous affair, will come off, to which there isn’t a doubt that I shall be invited,—­either to the wedding itself or to the banquet afterward.  It’s lucky that weddings need the jokes of brisk fellows like myself, and that without us they would be as dull as gatherings of pigs rather than of human beings!

From the ‘Epistolae,’ iii. 49.

UNLUCKY LUCK