“Why, these fellows here say they know how to do everything, and they haven’t left me a single thing.”  “By Jove,” cries Xanthus, “he has answered right well; for there is no man who knows everything.  That was why he laughed, it is clear.”  In the end, Xanthus buys Esop for sixty obols (about 7s. 6d.) and takes him home, where his wife (who is “very cleanly”) receives him only on sufferance.

One day Xanthus, meeting friends at the bath, sends Esop home to boil pease (idiomatically using the word in the singular), for his friends are coming to eat with him.  Esop boils one pea and sets it before Xanthus, who tastes it and bids him serve up.  The water is then placed on the table, and Esop justifies himself to his distracted master, who then sends him for four pig’s feet.  While they boil, Xanthus slyly abstracts one, and when Esop discovers this he takes it for a plot against him of the other slaves.  He runs into the yard, cuts a foot from the pig feeding there, and tosses it into the pot.  Presently the other foot is put back, and Esop is confounded to see five trotters on the boil.  He serves them up, however, and when Xanthus asks him what the five mean he replies:  “How many feet have two pigs?” Xanthus saying, “Eight,” quoth Esop:  “Then here are five, and the porker feeding below goes on three.”  On being reproached he urges:  “But, master, there is no harm in doing a sum in addition and subtraction, is there?” For very shame Xanthus forbears whipping him.

One morning Xanthus gives a breakfast, for which Esop is sent to buy “the best and most useful.”  He buys tongues, and the guests (philosophers all) have nothing else.  “What could be better for man than tongue?” quoth Esop.  Another time he is ordered to get “the worst and most worthless”; again he brings tongues, and again is ready with a similar defence.[132] A guest reviles him, and Esop retorts that he is “malicious and a busybody.”  On hearing this Xanthus commands him to find some one who is not a busybody.  In the road Esop finds a simple soul and brings him home to his master, who persuades his wife to bear with him in anything he should pretend to do to her; if the guest is a busybody (or one who meddles) Esop will get a beating.  The plan fails; for the good man continues eating and takes no notice of the wife-cuffing going on, and when his host seems about to burn her, he only asks leave to bring his own wife to be also placed on the pile.

  [132] This story is also found in the Liber de Donis of
        Etienne de Bourbon (No. 246), a Dominican monk of the
        14th century; in the Summa Praedicantium of John
        Bromyard, and several other medieval monkish collections
        of exempla, or stories designed for the use of
        preachers:  in these the explanation is that nothing can
        be better and nothing worse than tongue.

At a symposium Xanthus takes too much wine, and in bravado wagers his house and all that it contains that he will drink up the waters of the sea.  Out of this scrape Esop rescues him by suggesting that he should demand that all the rivers be stopped from flowing into the sea, for he did not undertake to drink them too, and the other party is satisfied.[133]