“You learned this morning how I myself came into this cage, and that my father was overseer of the temple granaries.  While I was wandering abroad he was deposed from his office, and would probably have died in prison, if a worthy man had not assisted him to save his honor and his liberty.  All this does not concern you, and I may therefore keep it to myself; but this man was the father of Klea and Irene, and the enemy by whose instrumentality my father suffered innocently was the villain Eulaeus.  You know—­or perhaps indeed you may not know—­that the priests have to pay a certain tribute for the king’s maintenance; you know?  To be sure, you Romans trouble yourselves more about matters of law and administration than the culture of the arts or the subtleties of thought.  Well, it was my father’s duty to pay these customs over to Eulaeus, who received them; but the beardless effeminate vermin, the glutton—­may every peach he ever ate or ever is to eat turn to poison!—­kept back half of what was delivered to him, and when the accountants found nothing but empty air in the king’s stores where they hoped to find corn and woven goods, they raised an alarm, which of course came to the ears of the powerful thief at court before it reached those of my poor father.  You called Egypt a marvellous country, or something like it; and so in truth it is, not merely on account of the great piles there that you call Pyramids and such like, but because things happen here which in Rome would be as impossible as moonshine at mid-day, or a horse with his tail at the end of his nose!  Before a complaint could be laid against Eulaeus he had accused my father of the peculation, and before the Epistates and the assessor of the district had even looked at the indictment, their judgment on the falsely accused man was already recorded, for Eulaeus had simply bought their verdict just as a man buys a fish or a cabbage in the market.  In olden times the goddess of justice was represented in this country with her eyes shut, but now she looks round on the world like a squinting woman who winks at the king with one eye, and glances with the other at the money in the hand of the accuser or the accused.  My poor father was of course condemned and thrown into prison, where he was beginning to doubt the justice of the gods, when for his sake the greatest wonder happened, ever seen in this land of wonders since first the Greeks ruled in Alexandria.  An honorable man undertook without fear of persons the lost cause of the poor condemned wretch, and never rested till he had restored him to honor and liberty.  But imprisonment, disgrace and indignation had consumed the strength of the ill-used man as a worm eats into cedar wood, and he fell into a decline and died.  His preserver, Klea’s father, as the reward of his courageous action fared even worse; for here by the Nile virtues are punished in this world, as crimes are with you.  Where injustice holds sway frightful things occur, for the gods seem to take the side of the wicked.  Those who do not hope for a reward in the next world, if they are neither fools nor philosophers—­which often comes to the same thing—­try to guard themselves against any change in this.